


ox hunger

by refusals



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Bulimia Nervosa, Chinese Translation Available, Eating Disorders, Food Issues, Graphic Description, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, kind of a hopeful ending though????
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-25
Updated: 2015-03-12
Packaged: 2018-03-09 03:17:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3234287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/refusals/pseuds/refusals
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve asks, “What’s going on, Buck?”</p>
<p>As in <i>What’s Eating Bucky Barnes.</i></p>
<p>Except of course it’s more like <i>What’s Bucky Barnes Eating.</i></p>
<p>(The answer to both questions would be sometimes nothing, sometimes everything.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> also available in [中文](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6211378/chapters/14230339), translated by [cjx2228](http://archiveofourown.org/users/cjx2228/pseuds/cjx2228). thank you!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> soooooooooo i wasn't sure about posting this because it's basically just a self-indulgent exploration of some personal feelings i'm trying to work through, written under the guise of """"fic""""" and as such has absolutely no plot or storyline... but idk it was still something i wanted to get out of my system and share????? I AM SORRY.
> 
>  **please note:** this story runs the risk of being incredibly triggering so please proceed with caution. it contains detailed descriptions of both the thought processes related to disordered eating and the physical acts of binging and purging.
> 
> also, thank you to the ever-brilliant [cryogenia](archiveofourown.org/users/cryogenia) for inspiring me to write something on this subject matter, and for letting me bounce ideas off them at weird hours of the night.

 

There are always rules.

Steve Rogers’s rules are confusing.

Steve Rogers tests the asset’s discpline with, “You can help yourself to whatever you want in the fridge,” and, “You don’t have to ask my permission to wear these clothes.” He forces the asset into a debt by giving him a bed of his own and hot water in the shower. He gives the asset useless orders like, “Describe my shirt to me,” yet won’t provide him with any actual missions, but he also does not punish the asset when he disobeys or gets something wrong.

Steve Rogers gives the asset the call sign ‘Bucky.’ This seems to be the only rule that Steve Rogers actually bothers to uphold, and even then, the asset does not get in trouble when he does not respond to the name.

 

* * *

 

After a few bewildering weeks, the asset comes to the following conclusions:

> i.  The call sign ‘Bucky’ is actually his name.
> 
> ii.  Steve Rogers is not Bucky’s handler. There are no handlers.
> 
> iii.  Which means there are no rules (?)

It’s that last bit that really fucks him up. Because there are _always_ rules, even if no one is explaining them to him outright (and those are the worst kinds of rules, the ones where it’s all guesswork and trial and error and making sure to remember exactly what the other person wants).

“You’re the only one who can make the rules for you, Buck,” Steve says when Bucky asks him about this.

_Oh._

Suddenly everything makes a lot more sense. There are still rules, obviously, but Steve trusts Bucky to be able to set them for himself. It's more faith than any of his previous handlers has ever shown him.

(Tells himself: _Because_ _Steve is not your handler._ )

Not wanting to fuck up what might be his only chance of proving to Steve that he can handle the responsibility of keeping himself in line, Bucky comes up with two rules that are based on some of HYDRA’s most important regulations, but modified to fit within the parameters of the current mission: Be Human.

> i.  No physical contact aside from customary interactions such as shaking hands or exchanging high fives. His new allies are kind people who do not deserve to get all mucked up by his filth. Notable Exception: if the contact is initiated by the other person, the asset is to follow along accordingly.
> 
> ii.  He is only allowed to eat when Steve is eating. Notable Exception: certain foods are entirely forbidden and are not to be touched under any circumstances, even if Steve is eating it.

 

* * *

 

(It turns out that Steve’s body is too warm, too familiar, too impossible to stay away from, so rule number one ends up being broken very quickly, and ultimately repealed altogether.)

 

* * *

 

The first time it happens, it’s at the very beginning, when everything is still dangerous and confusing.

It’s also an accident.

He’s sitting at the kitchen table and staring down at the plate of scrambled eggs that Steve has set before him, wondering if he is supposed to eat it, if it’s an indirect order or a test.

(It’s a test he has failed before. They let him remember what happened afterwards.)

The next thing he knows, he’s on his hands and knees being violently sick. He can’t recall having consumed the eggs, but there they are, a Pollock painting of off-colours on the kitchen tile floor.

“Sorry,” he croaks, pulse skyrocketing as he desperately starts trying to scoop up the mess with his bare hands. If he cleans up fast enough, maybe he won’t be punished, maybe nobody will grind his face in it, _“if you’re so fuckin’ hungry why don’t you eat it—”_

But Steve had told him to eat the eggs, hadn’t he? Or maybe he had just imagined that, to give himself permission that wasn’t actually being granted. He can’t remember.

“Jesus, Buck, what are you— Stop it!”

He freezes. Looks up, panicked, but vaguely registers that it’s horror in Steve’s expression, which is markedly distinct from disgust, so perhaps he’s not in trouble after all.

“Sorry,” he says again, just in case.

“Hey, no, it’s okay,” Steve tells him. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I shouldn’t’ve... We’ll try something plainer next time, okay? You... you just go take it easy. Get a glass of water, lie down. I’ll clean up here.”

The asset nods gratefully, relieved to have finally been given an objective that makes sense – Steve wants him to rest so he can resume fully functional status.

He rises on uneasy feet and is mildly stunned to find that his initial panic has receded into a shaky relief, a bizarre calm settling into him like rippled water going still. For once the unbearable malaise that walks alongside him more dependably than his shadow is absent. He is empty. Quiet.

_Safe._

He is floating away on this unexpected sensation as he mindlessly heads to the bathroom to wash himself off. It’s only when the cool water cascades down his soiled hands that he comes back to himself and he doesn’t know why he’s so surprised to discover that gravity is still a thing that exists, that he is not actually sailing away like an untethered balloon.

He wanders to the room that he’d been assigned and lies down on the bed as he’d been instructed to do. He briefly entertains the idea of burrowing beneath the blankets because he is shivering, but there don’t seem to be any other signs that he is not producing sufficient body heat and he isn’t sure if it falls within the mission parameters, so he just stays where he is, on top of the covers.

Steve enters the room a short while later and comes to sit next to him.

“How you feeling?” he asks.

The asset remembers how the word ‘operational’ makes a muscle in Steve’s jaw tighten in a way that causes a mild malfunction in the asset’s chest, so he just says, “Okay.”

“Do you want anything else to eat? Drink? Or did you want to wait a little?”

The asset blinks. It’s too many questions.

He says, “Yes,” because it’s probably the safest answer.

“‘Yes’ what? Sorry.”

The asset doesn’t know why Steve is apologising. He pauses, mouth hesitating around the words, then he clarifies, “I’ll... wait.”

“Okay,” Steve says agreeably. He stands up. “I’m going to go finish my breakfast, all right? I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me.”

The asset nods. Steve leaves the room and the asset has no idea what just happened, just that it didn’t hurt.

 

* * *

 

The less things start to hurt on the outside, the more the asset starts to hurt on the inside. It’s a very alarming phenomenon, and the asset is certain that he must be dying, though he cannot detect any actual errors in any of his systems.

The woman he shot (“Twice,” she likes to remind him with a wry smile) explains that it just means he is starting to feel human again. He knows that that’s the mission objective, but he’s not quite sure if he likes it.

 

* * *

 

The second time it happens, it’s less of an accident but still not entirely on purpose.

Despite the fact that he’s become quite good at Being A Person, there remain those times when he refuses to leave his room for days.

On the first day of one such spell, Steve leaves a sandwich and bowl of soup in front of the door. Bucky does not touch it, just lets it sit there until it’s spoiled and Steve takes it away with that look on his face that always makes Bucky feel like there’s a bowling ball sitting on his chest.

The next day, Steve has another sandwich. He says, very quietly, from the other side of the door, “Please eat this, Buck,” and Bucky knows it’s not an order, because he’s better now, but he still tells himself that it is, so that he has permission. He can’t be punished if he’s simply following orders, right?

(Wrong. Sometimes it’s a trick.)

He eats only enough to stop the room from spinning and the rest he rips up into tiny chunks that he keeps in bundles of napkins until he can flush it down the toilet when Steve is out. It’s a relief at first, a good compromise and a nice change from the gut-twisting dread he is used to feeling when he’s taken something he hasn’t earned.

But then he realises he's still just so _hungry_.

This is how he finds himself tiptoeing into the kitchen on the night after the third day. He knows he has to be quick; Steve is a light sleeper, he will have heard him getting up, and Bucky has maybe a five minute window before Steve comes to see if he’s all right, which is good for when he’s wandering around the apartment in a bleary daze after a nightmare and doesn’t know where he is, but would be very extremely bad if it were to happen now.

He works with a clinical efficiency that is surprising considering how keyed-up he feels, calculating the caloric and nutritional content of everything he sees and stacking it up against how quickly it can be consumed as well as how much satisfaction it will provide. He also takes note of the ‘forbidden’ foods, the ones he’s not allowed to have because they’re for important people _(“Dogs can’t eat chocolate, silly boy.”)_ , and makes sure to leave them untouched, regardless of how much the mere thought of their rich flavours almost makes his mouth water.  
  
He ends up with a can of mixed beans, a container of Greek yogurt, a box of granola, and some bananas, all of which he gathers up in his arms and takes back to his bedroom, along with a spoon, a bowl, and a can opener for the beans.

He can hardly believe it when he reaches his destination undetected. There is a certain rush he can’t deny feeling, an odd combination of fear and audacity, the former because of the lessons that he still cannot shake and the latter because he seems to have gotten away with it.

He starts to eat.

Something flicks off in his brain, and it’s only after he’s consumed three bananas, half of the granola, all the beans, and the entire container of yogurt that he realises he was probably supposed to _stop_ eating at some point.

The heaviness in his belly is at once both a foreign and familiar sensation. It’s obscene, satisfying, uncomfortable. Something he cannot remember having felt for days, years, decades, but also one that he can identify immediately because of all its connotations. He doesn’t understand the feeling itself, but he understands all too well its consequences.

He’s been so very bad.

He barely makes it to the washroom in time before everything’s coming back up, his body carrying on without him, as usual. The doctors said his body and brain have learned to do certain things on their own to protect him, which is why he fuzzes in and out of reality sometimes and can never quite believe anyone who says they will not hurt him.

Maybe this is another one of those things. His body making up for something that is beyond his control.

Steve is there suddenly, all low tones and soothing hands, murmuring, “It’s okay, you’re okay, you’re safe,” and if he notices the contents of the toilet bowl don’t match up with what they’d had for dinner, he doesn’t say anything.

Once the heaving has stopped and he’s wiped his eyes free of the involuntary tears that have gathered at their corners, Bucky rises to his feet.

“You okay?” Steve asks, in that tentative, wounded tone that Bucky has grown so tired of hearing.

Always the same fucking question.

Bucky rasps out a semi-convincing, “Yeah.”

Always the same answer.

Never quite the truth.

Steve makes to help Bucky back to his room, but pure panic surges up Bucky’s spine when he realises that this will mean Steve will see the evidence of his rule-breaking all over the bed; he hadn’t had time to clean up before he’d been sent running to the toilet. Steve might not have picked up on the discrepancy between what Bucky had thrown up and what they’d eaten for supper, but he would definitely notice the empty can of beans and the yogurt tub on the ground, the banana peels on the nightstand, the granola crumbs in his covers.

Bucky needs to keep Steve from following him to the bedroom at all costs.

“Hey, uh,” he says, wriggling out from under Steve’s guiding hand on the small of his back, “You don’t have to, um...” – _quick, Barnes, think,_ think – “I- I need to change the sheets.”

The statement sends a slight flush of humiliated heat blooming up in his cheeks even though it’s a lie, and it does not go unnoticed by Bucky that it’s maybe a little fucked-up that he’d rather claim he’d wet the bed than confess to have been eating food in his room. Still, it’s a surefire way to get Steve off his ass about it, because Steve knows how embarrassed Bucky gets about this, how he prefers to quietly take care of everything on his own, without Steve’s help, so that afterwards he can just crawl back under clean sheets and pretend none of it ever happened.

Sure enough, Steve takes the hint and simply kisses Bucky swiftly on the cheek before he retreat back to his own room, leaving Bucky exhaling shakily in relief.

He returns to his bedroom and tries to figure out what to do with the mess. Practically everything needs to be brought back to the kitchen to be put away, but Bucky doesn’t want to risk going out there again so he just hides the boxes and containers at the back of his closet. The banana peels also go into the back of the closet, wrapped up in several layers of Kleenex, to be thrown into the compost at the first opportunity. Steve never touches Bucky’s stuff, won’t even enter his room unless Bucky is already in there, so everything should be safe.

On to part two of the coverup: the sheets. The sheets which are perfectly clean aside from a few sprinkles of granola crumbs.

Bucky strips them from the mattress and bundles them into the laundry machine to make his story seem plausible.

He doesn’t bother remaking his bed when he comes back to it. He’s too damn exhausted, but even through the fog of weariness, he is distinctly aware of some other nearly polar-opposite sensation inside him – an indescribable high. It wars viciously with the anvil weight of guilt that’s always lodged deep in his belly, but at least the result is a balancing force, something to even things out when he felt like a planet about to be hurled out of orbit.

 

* * *

 

“I’ve done some terrible things,” Bucky reminds Steve every now and then, because it often seems like Steve forgets, because Steve still lays light trails of kisses along the shell of his ear and looks at him like he’s a Renaissance painting instead of a cheap forgery of something pure.

It’s not so much that Bucky wants Steve to realise what Bucky’s done and treat him badly because of it. It's not even that he thinks he _deserves_ for Steve to treat him badly because of it. He just wishes Steve would at least _acknowledge it._

Bucky himself has come to accept the fact that countless people’s lives ended at his hands. He’s come to terms with the horrible things he’s done, and while he doesn’t think he’ll ever truly be able to forgive himself, he still maintains a certain peace of mind by not being in denial about it. He won’t run from it, won’t try to make it into anything that it isn’t. He will  _own_  it, guilt and all. 

(When the guilt eats Bucky alive, Bucky eats right back.)

Steve, on the other hand, refuses to acknowledge it at all, which is why Bucky feels the need to remind him occasionally. His relationship with Steve is strong enough that Bucky doesn’t fear being cut out of Steve’s life if Steve were ever to wake up and pull the blinders off his damn eyes, but he just wishes that Steve didn’t feel the need to gloss things over all the time.

Because Steve always says, “It wasn’t you, Buck,” which is stupid because it obviously wasn’t anybody else, and Bucky can’t help but to wonder who Steve is trying to convince more when he says this – Bucky, or himself.

 

* * *

 

The third time, it’s definitely on purpose.

Bucky knows this because he doesn’t even have the excuse of hunger. He’d eaten a decent-sized lunch - still a little small for Steve’s tastes, but a victory nonetheless (though his earnest praise made Bucky want to peel off all of his own skin).

Now, Steve is out to see a movie with Sam, so Bucky has the house to himself and he doesn’t know what to do. He’s okay with being left alone, because he’s Doing So Well, but that doesn’t mean it’s always easy.

Today is one of those harder days. Itchy with a low-grade anxiety, he can’t seem to settle down, either on the outside or the inside. He’s a mass of wringing hands and jiggling knees, constantly standing up and switching seats, as if trying to remain one vibration ahead of some sinister presence.

He tries the thing that his therapists suggested, where he focuses on his surroundings with all of his senses, looking at everything from a purely objective viewpoint, letting whatever feelings he’s experiencing run their course without analysing or overthinking them. It’s something that’s a lot fucking easier said than done, and Bucky gives up after the first five minutes, the jacked-up nervous energy that’s coursing through his body certainly not helping the situation at all.

He needs to actually _do_ something. Something active, more corporeal.

His first instinct is to eat.

A harmless enough impulse, and one that he might even permit himself to indulge in, considering that it is the time of day that his doctors like him to try to have a snack.

Bucky heads to the kitchen, repeatedly telling himself that there’s nothing to worry about. He’s doing what he is supposed to. He’s Taking Care Of Himself.

So why is he still feeling that same rushed pressure that’s always nipping at his heels whenever he’s creeping out of his bedroom at ungodly hours to sneak food without permission? He knows for a fact that Steve won’t be home for another two hours, so he can take his time and not have to constantly be worrying about getting caught.

Bucky eats three unsalted crackers, each with a single pat of peanut butter, then waits to see what will happen.

Nothing.

No bomb siren goes off announcing his trespasses to the world, no STRIKE team comes storming through the windows with rifles cocked and stun batons ready, no one is yelling at him or spitting on him or kicking him until the food he’d eaten makes an encore appearance.

Bucky can’t help but to bark out a single punch of bitter, hysterical laughter at how stupid and irrational he was being. Of course nothing happened. He’s safe here. And has _always_ been safe here.

His name is James, he’s in Washington, D.C., it is a cool February afternoon in the year 2015, and he is not in trouble for eating crackers and peanut butter.

But the feeling of urgency, of being pressed for time, none of it has gone away, and it takes Bucky a moment to figure out why.

It’s as he’s licking peanut butter from his knife that he realises he’s been going about this all wrong.

The source of the urgency is not a fear of being caught. It has nothing to with fear at all.

It’s about _need_.

The closest comparison he can come up with is with someone who is starving to death. An immediate crisis. An emergency. A life or death situation that must be dealt with within seconds otherwise it’s all over. Granted, Bucky is obviously not starving to death – he’s not even that hungry at all – but hunger _itself_ screams at him as though he is, and he doesn’t quite understand why, or what he’s supposed to do about it.

So he reacts the way everyone has told him he should react when he experiences hunger.

He eats.

He sticks with the permitted foods at first – yogurt, buttered bread, plain cereal – but as he’s returning the raisin bran to the pantry, he sees the box of Oreos. Just sitting there, right in front of him at eye level, literally staring him in the face, and all of a sudden his mouth is full of the imagined taste of crumbling cookie and too-sweet icing—

But there are rules, and Oreos are Not Allowed.

Bucky pops the box open and takes one anyway.

(Natasha is always telling him that he should treat himself to something nice every now and then, isn’t she?)

The Oreo is his downfall.

The moment the cookie starts to melt on his tongue, he realises he’s made a terrible mistake. He fucked up oh god he fucked up so bad, and they’re going to _know_ , Steve is going to come back and see that one of the Oreos is missing, and Bucky is going to be in so much trouble, Steve is going to be furious that Bucky couldn’t even stick to his own goddamn rules—

He swallows the cookie.

—and then all of a sudden, the panic is gone. Replacing it is a cool composure, a detached, almost fatalistic peace of mind in the face of the inevitable.

He has another cookie. And then another. And one more. Stuffs two into his mouth at the same time.

All his rules have gone out the window. He already fucked up so the day is ruined anyway; he might as well go all the way with it, like a murderer on a crime spree wanting to make sure he earns that seat on the electric chair.

The calculated efficiency with which he’d gathered foods for his last Big Mistake is completely absent this time around. He snacks from a bag of roasted cashews as he amasses a seemingly disparate collection of items – bread, sour cream, frozen pizza pockets. Apple sauce. Ketchup. A brick of cheddar cheese and a package of pre-sliced Black Forest ham. There is no rhyme or reason whatsoever to his selection.

He puts the bread in the toaster and the pizza pockets in the microwave, nibbling at more Oreos while he waits for them to be ready. About halfway through, however, he decides he doesn’t have the patience, so he takes the pizza pockets out before they’re fully defrosted and eats them when they’re still cold and rubbery.

After that, he starts to assemble a sandwich filled with peanut butter, ketchup, grated cheddar, apple sauce, and slices of ham, all topped off with a dollop of sour cream. He wolfs down this thoroughly disgusting concoction without even so much as a grimace. It doesn’t matter _what_ it is, just that it’s going inside him.

(And just that it’ll be coming back out.)

A distant part of him is berating himself for this. What’s the use of taking this huge risk, of _eating_ , if he’s not even going to enjoy himself?

He already knows the answer, though: it’s because pleasure is not the point. And it never has been, with him.

For him, it’s always been survival.

And while he may no longer be in any immediate danger from external forces, he is still trapped in his own body with the most deadly enemy of all – the treacherous mass of cells that they call the brain.

The damned thing is never quiet. It won’t allow him a single moment’s peace. Sometimes he gets interludes of an uneasy, foggy blankness, but his doctors say that’s dissociation so it doesn’t really count.

Right now, however, there _is_ peace. His entire existence has been reduced to this one single action – consumption – and it’s causing him to be filled with a strange inner tranquility despite the decidedly chaotic scene around him. It’s very much the way he used to feel when he was on missions, so wrapped up in deadly, narrow focus that everything else just went silent.

Until, of course, he pulled the trigger of his rifle and then the world fell into chaos again.

Suddenly back in his own brain, Bucky stares at the mess he’s left on the kitchen island table as if he’s seeing it for the first time. A nearly-empty box of Oreos. Various opened jars and containers and ripped plastic packaging. The countertop and even parts of the floor are peppered with crumbs and viscous stains and shreds of cheese.

Oddly enough, Bucky does not panic. He has an extraction plan. Everything is under control.

Very calmly, he gets a tall drinking glass from the cupboard, fills it to the brim with water, and downs the entire thing in mere seconds. He heads to the bathroom, where he ties his hair back and drops to his knees before the toilet, the unsettled contents of his stomach already being sent sloshing around inside of him from the abrupt movement.

He knows how to do this. They’d taught him how. Shoved pencils and knives and sticks down his throat to make sure he coudn’t keep anything that he hadn’t properly earned.

He uses his toothbrush. The side with the bristles. It isn’t nice and neat like a supermodel who slides two slender fingers down her throat and gets everything out in one smooth, noiseless go. The toothbrush is coarse and itchy and it takes several vicious jabs before anything starts to happen. Mostly just gobs of saliva at first, then the real stuff, which comes out in several messy heaves rather than a single tidy surge, with a whole lot of gagging and gasping and spitting in between. It hurts. The chunks of pizza pocket aren’t nearly digested enough, having not even been fully defrosted when they went down, the toast scrapes up his esophagus, and the Oreos and peanut butter cling to the walls of throat, making him feel like he’s choking.

When it feels like he’s gotten as much of it out of him as he can, Bucky flushes the toilet and staggers backwards to slump on the floor next to the bathtub, leaning his head back onto the tiled wall as he struggles to catch his breath.

Though his body is staging a violent rebellion against the strain it had just been put through – temples pounding, throat raw, limbs quaking – his mind is soft and wispy with relief. It’s the oddly satisfied feeling of staring at a vacated room whose furnishings have just been packed away to be moved. Clean. Calm. A bittersweet emptiness.

 _Finally,_ his brain is quiet.

He sits there for a long moment, soaking up the silence until it starts to dissolve and the throbbing in his skull becomes the more prominent sensation. Groaning, he stumbles to his feet, finding himself having to cling onto the sink counter to keep his legs from giving out beneath him.

There’s nothing he would rather do right now than flop face-first into bed and stay there for about a million years, but the kitchen needs to be taken care of because it looks like a bunch of teenagers came over for lunch. Bucky quickly does away with the mess, but leaves a bit of cracker crumbs on the island counter to make it look like he’d had a snack so Steve will be happy with him. It’s technically not a lie – Steve doesn’t have to know that the snack hadn’t exactly ended after the crackers. Things could get dangerous if Steve gets suspicious about the suddenly disappearing food, but Bucky thinks he did all right in not completely destroying everything he’d touched. He’d left a bit of everything in their boxes and jars and packages as not to raise too many alarms.

In contrast to impulsiveness of the initial act of gorging himself, the aftermath is all very deliberate, but it too provides its own bizarre atmosphere of calm.

This is when rules come back in play. Simple, easy rules.

Took too much? Get rid of it.

Made a mess? Clean it up.

Broke a rule? Make it look like you didn’t.

Not sure if you deserve to be here? Leave as little a mark as possible.

 

* * *

 

“We should go out for dinner tonight,” Bucky says casually one Friday afternoon.

Steve blinks at him over the book that he’s reading. “Really?”

“Well, we don’t _have_ to if you don’t—”

“No, no, I’d love to,” Steve cuts in quickly, his expression equal parts tentative and hopeful. “It’s just... Well, you usually don’t like going to restaurants.”

To be fair, it’s true. Not only is Bucky still wary of crowded public places, but eating out brings a whole new set of difficulties to an activity that is already so complicated. Since the meal is something that is paid for, everything in it – even the foods that he might permit himself to eat at home – is by definition Not Allowed. It’s Not Allowed even if Bucky is footing the bill himself, which he realises makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, but money is not what he’d been taught he had to offer, so he still always feels as though he has not earned things he buys.

Now, however, he has discovered another form of currency and is curious to see if it works.

A part of him acknowledges that it’s pretty messed-up to be almost _excited_ about this. Up until now, his... mistakes... have always been just that – mistakes. Spontaneous moments of weakness in which he couldn’t help but to give in to some indescribable, almost animalistic need, and while he would be rewarded with an incredible relief in the immediate aftermath, it was always temporary. It always ended up eroding into a skin-crawling self-loathing that would, inexplicably, have him wanting to do it to himself all over again, though whether for punishment or an attempt at further relief, he does not know.

What he _does_ know, however, is that this time, it is much more premeditated. As in, not an impulse error on his part, nor an egregious indication of his total lack of self-control. And that’s what makes all the difference.

If it’s not a mistake, it’s somehow not as disgraceful. It’s still fucked-up and wrong and disgusting, but it’s his _choice_.

And god help him, but he’s fucking looking forward to it.

 

* * *

 

He, Steve and Sam go to a nearby Lebanese restaurant that evening.

(The thing with being a group of war veterans out to dinner is that everyone is pretty quick to agree where to sit. Back wall, best view of the room, unobstructed line of sight to all entrances and exits.)

Bucky is buzzed with an anxiety that is a bizarre blend of eagerness and dread. He digs into the hummus platter the moment it’s set down on the table, even though the big puffs of pita are still almost too hot to touch and he swears out loud when he scalds his mouth.

Sam raises an eyebrow at him and cracks a small, crooked grin. “Hungry much?”

Bucky freezes mid-chew, the too-hot pita sitting like a lump of burning coal on his tongue.

Sam’s smile falters slightly and his tone is a shade more careful when he raises his hands and says, “Hey, man, it’s cool. Super soldier metabolism, I get it. Your pal Rogers here damn near ate me out of my house the last time he crashed there.”

Steve makes a noise that’s suspiciously close to a giggle. Bucky doesn’t understand what’s so funny, he’s too busy trying to swallow the food that suddenly feels like a clump of sawdust in his mouth, but he hears – sounding very far away for some reason – Steve snickering, “Yeah, you _wish.”_

“Ha ha ha,” Sam deadpans. “I get it. ‘Ate me out.’ Hilarious, Rogers. You’re ninety-six, not twelve.”

Bucky finally chokes down the mouthful of food and forces a laugh, because that’s what you’re supposed to do when people are being silly.

He keeps stuffing his face with pita and hummus, occasionally stopping to react to the conversation so that nobody gets suspicious even though he couldn’t care less about what Steve and Sam are talking about. Right now, the only thing that matters is the food, the way eating creates a barrier of white noise that makes everything else disappear, or at least, not matter anymore.

That is, until the chewing stops. Then the panic and guilt set in, sitting heavy in his gut, indistinguishable from all the food he’d just packed down.

Good thing he knows how to get rid of both.

He guzzles his entire glass of water then stands up and announces that he’s going to use the restroom. Even as recently as a couple of months ago, he wouldn’t have been able to do this on his own, so it’s truly a testament to just How Much Better he is when Steve hardly spares him a glance, just nods before resuming his conversation with Sam.

Bucky hurries down the hall towards the restrooms, relieved to find that they are the single-person kind with the lock on the door. He shuts himself in and turns on the fan before he lowers himself on shaky legs before the toilet.

There’s nothing here to use but his fingers, which he stabs down his throat with all the viciousness of a hunter wielding a spear.

What happens next is by far the most disgusting scene yet. The hummus comes out looking like literal shit and tasting like something you might find leaking out of a dead body. The pita sticks in clumps in his throat. He has to keep jabbing away with his fingers to get it all out, meaning he inevitably ends up puking all over his own hand, which he wipes on his pants without even thinking about it before sticking it right back in.

He’s not sure how long he stays there, heaving and choking and becoming increasingly certain that his eyeballs are going to burst in their sockets, but eventually his retching eases into gasps and coughs. He rocks backwards off his knees and into a squat, which he maintains until he thinks he can stand without toppling over, then he flushes the toilet and goes to wash his hands. His human hand is absolutely filthy, slick with saliva and spattered with partly-digested chunks of food, and he scrubs away at it until the skin is raw and the smell is all but replaced by the sterile scent of cheap public washroom soap.

He looks up into the mirror that hangs on the wall behind the sink and for some reason he’s surprised to see his own face staring back at him from the glass, even though he’s not sure what else he’d been expecting. He carefully examines his reflection to determine whether or not his appearance will raise any suspicions when he returns to the table, then splashes himself with cold water in hopes of reducing how sweaty and flushed he looks.

As he’s reaching into his pocket for a breath mint, he notices the smear of vomit he’d left when he’d wiped his hand on his pants and it damn near gives him a heart attack. His hands are shaking as he balls up a wad of toilet paper and tries his best to scrub it off, almost crying in relief when it fades into a barely-noticeable stain.

He pops the breath mint, sucks on it for a few seconds, then spits it back out. Straightens his hair. Smiles into the mirror before he leaves.

He’s back in the game.

 

* * *

 

The rest of the meal is uneventful. Bucky doesn’t talk as much as Sam and Steve do, but that’s normal for him. He manages to eat his main dish – braised lamb and rice – at a normal pace, though of course this does not stop him from using the washroom again before they leave.

The dizziness doesn’t go away this time, though, and he stumbles a little as they’re stepping out of the restaurant, causing Steve to place one hand against Bucky’s belly and the other at his back to steady him. Bucky has the strange urge to lean into him in both directions at once.

“Whoa,” Sam says, concern furrowing his brow. “You all right there?”

Bucky sags against Steve’s shoulder, the adrenaline that had been the only thing keeping him upright suddenly bleeding out of him as though a drain had been unplugged.

“A bit... overwhelmed,” he says, because he knows exactly how to steer the conversation away from the truth. It’s going to cost him in guilt, but at least his secret will stay safe.

Sure enough, Steve gives an understanding nod and his voice is brimming with pride when he says, “It’s been a long night for you, but you did good. You did real good.”

Bucky forces a smile that’s all peppermint and teeth.

 

* * *

 

The pattern changes slightly after that. Little by little, what were once spur-of-the-moment lapses of self-control, no more premeditated than coming down with a bad cold, evolve into something almost like a ritual. Bucky may not always plan for it to happen, but when it does, it starts to follow a certain routine.

It helps – or doesn’t help, depending on your viewpoint – that Steve has started working again, because it allows Bucky time to indulge in every step of the procedure.

He struggles with being alone at first, though.

The first time Steve gets sent overseas for an operation, Bucky discovers that it’s a lot harder to eat without Steve around to give him implicit permission. He hadn’t noticed until now just how much it’d helped to have Steve do those little things like calling Bucky to join him at the dinner table or giving Bucky an encouraging nod as he stared at the plate of food in front of him.

He spends most of the first day alone at war with himself over what to eat, hating that it’s still even an issue at all. He’s supposed to be Better Now. And he is, in a lot of ways. He no longer waits for orders for every single thing he does. Doesn’t cower away expecting punishment for the slightest mistakes. He can do his own laundry and buy his own groceries and make his own appointments, so why does something as seemingly simple as _eating_ still continue to pose such a problem?

The hunger steadily whittles away at him until he finally gives in and permits himself to consume some items on his list of Allowed Foods, which is derived partially from HYDRA’s rules but with some more recent additions made by Bucky as he’d slowly learned he was allowed to eat more than just lettuce and protein bars.

It’s still a rather short list, but he’s grateful for it nonetheless. It keeps him safe. As long as he only ever eats his food, he’ll be fine, things are under control, the universe is all still in order.

This lasts another day before he decides fuck it, he’s sick of beans and smoothies (and he’d even cheated a little bit there – strawberries are Not Allowed), he needs something _more_.

It is a need so basic, so primal, that it slices right through even the strongest of the remaining cords of his conditioning. A desire for instant gratification that overrides his entire system, even his normally unshakeable sense of guilt and unworthiness.

Steve had stocked up their kitchen pretty well before he left, in case Bucky got caught in one of those slumps where he couldn’t leave the house and was thus unable to buy groceries for himself. There are a lot of forbidden foods, because Steve wanted Bucky to feel pampered while he was away.

“Don’t party too hard while I’m gone,” he’d told Bucky as he left.

“Stark’s already on his way,” Bucky had quipped. “He’s bringing Victoria’s Secret models.”

Steve had laughed, kissed him goodbye.

He couldn’t possibly have known that Bucky would spend the next five hours walking into and out of the kitchen trying to psych himself up enough to be able to eat.

Or, that two days later, Bucky would have devoured most of the treats that Steve had bought him that were meant to last the rest of the week.

Half a tub of mango sorbet. An entire box of those Dunkaroos snacks with the graham cookies that you dip in icing. Six slices of bread slathered with fruit jelly. A whole package of mini-brownies. An indeterminable amount of chocolate bars.

Because nobody is coming home any time soon, Bucky is free to leave his mess in the kitchen while he goes to the washroom for the second stage of his routine. He knows it’s a waste of water and electricity but he still always runs the shower and turns on the bathroom fan even when he’s home alone, partly because he’s paranoid, but also because he’s come to regard those accompanying sounds as an important atmospheric element of the ritual. (He is a creature of habit, after all; it’s just that all his habits are bad ones.) Finally, he takes off his shirt and, for some reason, his pants, runs warm water over his fingers, and kneels in front of the toilet in a sick pantomime of prayer.

When it’s all over, he is somehow both depleted and giddy. He’d like to sit back and disappear but there are things that need to be done. He rinses his mouth, washes his face, cleans the toilet, and spritzes the bathroom with air freshener before returning to the kitchen hide all the evidence. Dishes are washed and crumbs are swept away. Packaging and wrappers are thrown out. Any remaining food is taken to his room and hidden in his closet, which he realises isn’t necessary right now since Steve won’t be home for another two days, meaning Bucky can sneak out to the kitchen whenever he wants, but again, he finds solace in sticking to his habits.

There is something oddly satisfying about this part, the coverup. Sometimes when he’s feeling all jacked-up, it helps to do some mindless activity like alphabetising his bookshelf or colour-coding the clothes in his closet (though the latter does not usually last very long because a good eighty percent of the closet’s contents are various shades of black).

Cleaning up the kitchen kind of helps him in the same way.

By the time he is finished, the kitchen actually looks _better_ than before, and he likes how it shows that he is capable of putting something back together so well that it appears to still be untouched.

It’s not much different than what he’s learned to do with himself, really. To put himself back together. Make himself better than before. He knows how to dress nicely and look handsome. He no longer flinches away from people who reach out to touch him. He’s perfected the wry angle of the ‘old’ Bucky Barnes’s smile, after having spent long hours examining what rare photographs of himself Steve had managed to salvage.

He’s done such a good job, in fact, that everyone from his therapists to his friends are pleased with How Much Better he is now.

Just ‘better’ is not enough, though.

 

* * *

 

The night after Steve returns, they find themselves snuggled up on the couch at three a.m., Steve having been woken by a nightmare, and Bucky not even having gone to sleep at all, and Bucky takes the opportunity to ask, “Am I better than I was before?”

“Of course you are,” Steve says, his raised eyebrow indicating how obvious he thinks the answer should be.

Bucky sighs. “No, I don’t mean... Like, yeah, of course I’m better than when- when I first came home, but I’m talking about... _Before_ before.”

Steve stiffens, causing Bucky to shift his weight away from Steve’s body.

 _“Before_ before,” Steve repeats quietly. “You mean...”

“Yeah.”

There is a long, rueful silence as Steve is clearly struggling to find a way to answer the question in a way that isn’t either hurtful, or a lie.

Finally, he says, extremely carefully, “Those are two things that can’t be compared, Buck. Apples ‘n’ oranges, and all that. Besides, that’s not... There’s not even a proper way to measure that.” He pauses, then adds, “That’s like me asking you if you think I’m better now than I was when I was— you know... before the serum. And I’m not talkin’ about the health stuff, ‘cause obviously _that's_ better, I mean, like... Me.”

Bucky thinks about this for a moment before he says, “No, that’s different. There’s no comparison to be made, because you’re still the same person. An obnoxious punk with no self-preservation instinct whatsoever.”

Steve snorts slightly with laughter but his expression remains somber.

“The thing is,” he says softly, “I’m _not_ the same person I was back then. I’m not even the same person I was a year ago. Everyone changes, Buck.”

“But there’s still, like, this core of you that’s always _you,”_ Bucky insists, even though he’s not quite sure what he’s getting at anymore, he just knows there’s something fundamentally different about the two of them and he needs Steve to understand that, too.

“Mmm, I don’t know,” Steve muses, “Maybe. But isn’t that the case with everyone, then?”

Bucky shakes his head. “I’ve been erased and rewritten so many times that there’s nothing of me left.”

Steve lets out a soft, sad sigh, reaching over his lap to find Bucky’s hand and lace their fingers together, giving them a small squeeze.

“Nothing wrong with starting over,” he says, so fucking earnestly that Bucky can’t bring himself to snap at him about how things aren’t that goddamn simple.

 

* * *

 

Except for the things that are.

Food goes down.

Food comes back up.

Nothing wrong with starting over.

_Wipe him._

 

* * *

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> same warnings apply.

 

The week that Bucky’s therapist brings up self-forgiveness, Bucky takes a detour on the way home in order to be able to stop at a fast food drive-through where he gets a cheeseburger, a large fries, twenty chicken nuggets, a milkshake, and two drinks to make it look like he’s picking up meals for more than one person, because nobody needs to know that he’s going to pull over into the next empty lot and wolf it all down himself.

He’s not sure why this particular therapy session and its subject matter fucked him up so badly. Maybe because forgiveness is not something he ever thinks about. It’s not so much that he doesn’t think he deserves it, but he doesn’t even _want_ it. As far as he’s concerned, forgiveness is complacency. If he forgives himself for the crimes he’s committed, he’ll be just like Steve, trying to sweep everything under the rug and not have to take any responsibility for it anymore. It’s the ultimate cowardice.

Bucky prides himself on his almost ruthlessly accepting attitude towards his own situation – yes, he’s done some terrible things, and yes he’s going to have to work the rest of his life to make up for it, so he will. And yes, he also harbours immense guilt over it, sometimes to the point where it feels like that’s the only thing inside his body and he has to flush out his entire system just to be able to breathe, but forgiveness won’t solve any of that.

As he’s pulling into a parking lot behind a gas station, he notices his hands are fucking shaking around the steering wheel and at first he’s worried that something is physically wrong with him, but then he remembers it’s probably just Feelings.

One of the many still-bewildering aspects of this new life of his.

Literal physical freedom from HYDRA is not the only kind of freedom he’s been granted in this new world – there are so many other subtler but no less important liberties that he’s still coming to terms with, such as more or less unrestricted access to an entire spectrum of emotions that he never would have thought himself to be capable of feeling, let alone expressing.

In the beginning, he couldn’t even put a name to them. His therapist tried to help him figure it out by giving examples on how different emotions feel in the body. Sadness a tightness or weight in his chest or belly. Fear starting in his stomach and moving upwards into a flutter of fast breath and speedy pulse. Joy is an outward pressure and anger a curled-in tension.

Bucky didn’t tell his therapist that he experiences a lot of these things all at once sometimes, and even though he’s gotten a little better at identifying what he’s feeling, he still doesn’t know what to do about any of it half the time. His emotions feel insidious and threatening, like magma bubbling just below the earth’s crust, laying in patient wait for a fissure to develop. And maybe this is how the fissure forms: the food filling him up until the pressure reaches a breaking point, splitting him wide open, and sending everything bursting through the surface.

The resulting eruption is not nice to look at. It’s nothing like a real volcano, which is a wondrous and humbling spectacle of mother nature at her most livid, all wild red lashes of lava and predatory black smoke. It’s ugly and messy and so very deeply unpleasant, and he hates every moment of it as it’s happening, just as he hates himself even more afterwards, but at the same time, he… doesn’t. A strange paradoxical blend of pain and relief, like laughing so hard that your stomach seizes up and you can’t breathe.

There are some people who say depression is anger with nowhere to go. Maybe this – the eating, the vomiting, all the venom and voltage he can never quite shake out of his veins – maybe it’s depression going everywhere at once.

Bucky ducks into the gas station’s restroom and he’s already feeling so sick from how greasy and gross the fast food was that he only has to lean over and contract his stomach before it’s all coming back up on its own.

This. _This_ is what he needs. Not forgiveness, but brutality.

 

* * *

 

“I’m sorry I’m away so much,” Steve tells Bucky the day after he’s returned from a three-day operation helping the Avengers take out an AIM base.

“Don’t be,” Bucky says with a shrug, and he means it. “I can get by on my o—”

“Whoa, hey, if I’m not allowed to say that then neither are you,” Steve chides, tapping Bucky on the nose, and his lips are crooked in a good-natured smile onto which Bucky can’t help but to place a quick, closed-mouth kiss because okay, maybe he’s _kind of_ missed this more than he thought he did.

“It’s fine, though,” Bucky insists. “Really. I’m actually really happy you’re back at work and all that stuff.”

“I just wish it didn’t have to take me so far from home so often,” Steve says. “I don’t… I don’t want you to get lonely.”

“Steve. You were in Jersey. I think I got the better end of the deal in this situation. Besides, I’m not lonely.”

“No?”

“Nah. I’m just sorry it’s my fault we have to stay in D.C. You know, with my… my doctors and stuff.”

“Don’t be sorry about that. It’s not your fault. I’d live in goddamn Canada if that was where the best doctors were.”

“Well, at least there it’d be free.”

“Bucky, your treatment’s almost fully covered,” Steve reminds him dryly.

Bucky can barely keep himself from flinching. He really didn’t need to be reminded of yet another thing he’s been receiving without having earned it. Worse still, this is something that he could never earn, because it something that he doesn’t even _deserve_. The very government that he’d been trying to take down is the one paying his medical bills, while millions of citizens around the country who are actually good, innocent people are forced to decide between buying their medication or buying food.

“Sorry,” Bucky mumbles, even though he knows Steve couldn’t possibly be able to tell what he’s thinking right now.

Sure enough, Steve raises an eyebrow and says, “What?”

“No— never mind. Nothing. Sorry.”

“Are we done with all the unnecessary apologising now?” Steve asks.

Bucky shrugs, but also smiles. “For the next ten or so minutes, maybe.”

“So you’re sure you’re okay being left alone so often,” Steve says after a moment, and it would be more annoying that he doesn’t take what Bucky says at face value if it weren’t for the fact that half the time, he’s right not to.

“I am,” Bucky replies tiredly. “I swear. I actually kinda like it, sometimes.”

“You _are_ pretty good at keeping yourself busy,” Steve notes, likely thinking about the time Bucky spends at the gym down the street, the soup kitchen that he occasionally serves lunch at, the dogs he walks for the local shelter.

Little does he know that Bucky hardly does any of that stuff anymore because his latest pastime seems to have taken priority over everything else.

There’s another pause then Steve says cautiously, “You could come with us sometime, if you wanted. I mean, with the Avengers. If… you know… if you find yourself going stir-crazy here.”

Bucky’s smile is a little more forced this time. “Thanks for the offer, Stevie. Really. But I’m afraid that Trying Not To Be Crazy is my full time job at the moment.”

Steve looks like he doesn’t know whether or not it’s okay to laugh at this, so Bucky leads the way with an only slightly cynical chuckle and Steve soon follows nervously suit but then he has to go and fuck it all up by being earnest when he says, “I’m so proud of you, Buck.”

Guilt hardens in Bucky’s throat like wax.

_No. No, you’re not. You can’t be. You certainly wouldn’t be, if you knew._

“You’re working so hard,” Steve continues, “And you’ve come so far. In the very beginning, literally all you’d eat were MREs. You wouldn’t even let me heat them up. But now we eat all kinds of food together. We even go to restaurants. And every time I come back from a mission, I find you’ve eaten practically all of the snacks.”

Bucky suddenly goes very still and very cold.

 _This_ is Steve’s marker for his progress? What he’s been _eating?_  Has the shift in his eating habits really been so obvious that Steve’s noticed the change and interpreted it as a sign that Bucky is Getting Better?

 _Of course he would_ , Bucky berates himself. Nothing gets past that guy, especially not when it comes to possible signs of wellness that may or may not actually exist outside of Steve’s overly hopeful imagination.

“Sorry,” Bucky says again.

Steve looks genuinely confused.

“Sorry?” he repeats. “Sor— oh, no Bucky, no. Don’t be sorry, it’s great that you’re allowing yourself to enjoy food.”

“I eat so much of it, though,” Bucky says, voice cracking, suddenly feeling dangerously close to tears and he doesn’t know why. “Too much. I- I’m sorry.”

“God, no, Bucky… You should have as much as you want. Well, maybe put a cap on the amount of junk food, but even then, super soldier metabolism, right?”

Bucky stares at Steve a little incredulously. The way Steve’s talking about all of this – food, eating, treats – it’s so casual, almost blithe. Doesn’t Steve realise how fucking complicated it all is? How can he just be smiling about it like it’s nothing?

“Honestly,” Steve continues, “The food is one of the best things about this century, so I’m glad to see you’re starting to appreciate it, too.”

“Steve,” Bucky says, fighting to keep his tone light and teasing when really he feels like a shrieking car alarm inside, “You’re saying this like we’re some haute cuisine kitchen, not one whose pantry is full of Lucky Charms and canned soup with dinosaur-shaped noodles.”

“It also comes in animal-shaped noodles,” Steve notes helpfully.

Bucky laughs a little, wondering which shapes would be the easiest to get back up.

 

* * *

 

After that, Bucky starts regularly smuggling food into his room at night, slowly enough that it’s unnoticeable, and by the end of the week, he usually has enough hidden in the back of his closet to be able to engage in a relatively satisfying eating session. It’s safest this way, because now he no longer runs the risk of Steve noticing disproportionately large quantities of food disappearing in abnormally short periods of time.

(When Steve asks about the running water at odd hours, Bucky says he finds he gets a better sleep if he showers late at night.

“I’m so glad you’re working so hard to take care of yourself,” Steve beams at him, and Bucky smiles back, teeth gnashing ferociously together behind his lying lips.)

The downside about playing it safe like this is that Bucky is only free to run through his little practice once a week, maybe twice if he’s lucky, so on the days when Steve is away, Bucky takes the opportunity to go absolutely _nuts_. He arbitrarily creates a new rule:

> i. When Steve isn’t there, the Rules no longer apply.

Bucky justifies this to himself by insisting that he needs to be able to get this out of his system every now and then, otherwise something even worse would happen. He doesn’t quite know what this ‘worse’ thing would entail, all he knows is that it exists, and must be prevented at all costs. Which means sometimes he just has to let himself go, let himself give into the monster of need that is constantly slinking around in his gut.

God help him, but Bucky actually starts to look forward to Steve leaving. As soon as he finds out that Steve will be going away, he starts preparing for it - cutting down on his food intake both to preemptively compensate for his upcoming indulgences and also to make it all the more wickedly satisfying when he finally does get to eat as much as he wants.

In the hours immediately before Steve’s departure, Bucky is as restless and fidgety as a kid in last period waiting for the final bell to ring, wracked with hunger, drunk with anticipation, but he’s since learned to contain himself because Steve always mistakes his nerves for separation anxiety and has more than once offered to stay home with him.

That’s Bucky’s cue to smile sweetly and say, “No, you go off and do your thing, ya big hero. I’ll be fine.”

As soon as Steve is gone, Bucky can finally begin. He heads out to buy food, rotating between grocery stores and mini-marts and sometimes drive-throughs so that none of the cashiers get too suspicious of his constant large and occasionally bizarre purchases (“Let me guess – you got teenaged boys at home?” a well-intentioned clerk had once joked, making Bucky cringe inwardly as he stammered something about picking up craving foods for a pregnant friend).

When Bucky returns home, he lays all the food out on the island counter in the order that they will be consumed. There really is nothing quite like the luxury of being able to eat uninterrupted in a huge, shiny kitchen with an island counter that you can circle like a starving buzzard that suddenly has first pick in an entire savanna of death. He starts off with whatever’s healthiest, the logic being that it will stay in him the longest and thus might actually provide some sort of nutrition, then he moves on to savoury, then the sweets, just as a regular meal is followed by dessert.

It is when he’s gorging himself that his brain finally goes silent in a way that is only achievable when he is home alone like this. That kind of tranquility is impossible when he’s hiding in the closet at midnight, eating as fast as he can and trying not to make too much noise, because Steve is right in the next room and could come knocking on the door at any moment. This leaves Bucky often feeling anxious and unsatisfied even after a ‘successful’ session, because he’d been too busy worrying about getting caught to be able to properly attend to every part of his ritual, too busy keeping an ear open for the telltale sound of footsteps to be able to revel in the disorientating endorphin rush and subsequent calm.

This is why he cherishes his alone time so dearly. It allows him the luxury to carry out his ritual in full, loving detail, from the way he arranges the foods on the table to not having to worry about making too much noise in the washroom.

Then again, he’s no longer the gagging, spluttering amateur that he once was. Everything comes up a lot easier than it used to. Sometimes he doesn’t even need to use his fingers, just has to lean over and contract his stomach muscles in a certain way and his body does the work for him.

(And if it just so happens that a little swirl of red appears in the toilet bowl despite him not having eaten anything of that colour, well, the serum should take care of whatever caused that, right?)

Another upside to being home alone is that Bucky is free to lay around and bask in the purifying sensation of emptiness after having used the toilet. He doesn’t have to go rush to tidy up the kitchen, he can just enjoy how light he feels, can wait for the room to stop spinning before he gets to his feet again.

Guilt and disgust inevitably set in sometime after that. Bucky still hasn’t figured out how to bypass this part of the process without redoing the whole cycle all over again.

That’s when he comes up with an addendum to the latest rule:

> i. When Steve isn’t there, the Rules no longer apply. Note: When Steve is there, the Rules shall be adhered to with absolute utmost discipline to make up for everything else.

Problem solved.

 

* * *

 

It’s not long before Bucky discovers that the problem is very much _not_ solved.

“Hey, uh, is everything okay?” Steve asks him over dinner, as Bucky’s drawing patterns in his mashed potatoes with his fork.

Bucky is so startled that he nearly drops his cutlery. “What?”

“Well, I dunno,” Steve says uncomfortably, eyes darting nervously around the room, “It’s just… You’re so tired lately and you haven’t had much of an appetite…”

“I…” Bucky says, but the words dry up in his throat, and he tries to take a mouthful of the mashed potatoes just to make a point but he can’t seem to lift the fork to his mouth.

“You know you can always tell me if something’s wrong,” Steve urges gently. “You shouldn’t feel like you have to hide anything from me.”

Bucky fidgets in his seat, playing for time, trying to come up with a non-answer for Steve that’ll satisfy him enough to get him off his back without actually giving him any real information. Confessing to a misdemeanor to distract from the felony.

He’s pretty disappointed with himself when the only thing he can come up with on the spot is, “Just having a bit of a tough time, I guess.”

He almost winces at how pathetically inadequate a response it is, but it seems to be enough for Steve, whose face becomes even more open and earnest than usual.

“I can drop out of this weekend’s S.H.I.E.L.D. assignment,” Steve says. “They don’t _really_ need me there; I know they have the manpower, so it’s probably just a morale thing.”

“Steve, no—”

“We can just take it easy this weekend. Together.”

Bucky despairs inwardly. The very last thing he wants this weekend is company. After two weeks of strictly adhering to the Rules by day, eating out of his closet like a fucking rat by night, and puking in the washroom with Steve just across the hall, Bucky had been looking forward to a lavish, stress-free over-the-top eating session. He’d been obsessing over it ever since he found out that Steve was going to be out of town that weekend. Fantasised about cheesecake, fettuccine alfredo, caramel popcorn; about bursting free from all his self-imposed restrictions and surrendering himself to both need and emptiness.

But right now Steve’s stupid face is all sunlight and patience, and Bucky can’t bear to deny anything from him when Steve has already denied himself so much time and time again, so at Steve’s offer to spend the weekend together, Bucky somehow just ends up putting together a makeshift smile and saying, “Sounds good, Stevie. I can’t wait.”

 

* * *

 

The weekend gets off to a tough start. Bucky had been in Anticipation Mode the entire week, able to slough through extended periods of restriction with the knowledge that he’ll soon have his reward, so needless to say, he is currently feeling incredibly unsatisfied, in a way that’s actually physically and emotionally uncomfortable. He’s almost angry at Steve for ruining his plans, and then he feels guilty and stupid for that, because it’s not Steve’s fault at all, and really, Bucky should be viewing this as one of those things that are For The Best, because at least this way his body is getting a break from the abuse he’s been putting it through more and more regularly these days, with less and less mercy.

Still, Bucky’s all thrown off by the change in plans. He finds he can’t stick to the usual Steve-is-here rules of only eating foods that are Allowed, because his mindset is all wrong; he’s too hung up on the fact that today he was supposed to be able to eat whatever he wanted.

So he decides, fuck it. He’ll do it anyway. He eats everything that Steve cooks for him. He breaks a good two dozen rules in doing so, but he justifies it by telling himself that it’ll be good to have Steve see him eating normally. It’s very important that Steve thinks he’s eating normally.

And yet… the sense of incompletion, of _hunger,_ don't go away even though Bucky eats a delicious breakfast and a filling lunch and is also able to keep both of them down, fighting tooth and nail against the sickening weight of _toomuchtoomuchtoomuch_ lying at the pit of his belly.

It’s then that he realises that it has less to do with satiation of hunger than the rebuffing of it. The true relief comes not from feeding the hunger, but from ultimately rejecting it. This whole time he’d thought the most satisfying part of all this was finally being able to cave and give into his hunger - and while this _is_ indeed an immensely gratifying experience, it’s the part _after_ that that matters the most. When he proves himself to be above hunger, and he flares to life with some alchemic chemistry unique only to an empty, flushed-out vessel.

This is why dinner ends up in the toilet that night, though Bucky feels bad because Steve had been pretty proud of that steak.

 

* * *

 

The second day of the weekend, Bucky wakes up feeling as though there’s a tacky film of filth covering his entire body and he realises it’s because of his weakness yesterday. He never should have let himself go like that, even if it _did_ help Steve get off his back in terms of his concerns about Bucky’s appetite.

Bucky makes a vow to make up for it today, no matter what. He figures he can get away with eating less today since Steve witnessed for himself how much he’d eaten yesterday.

Still, Bucky’s chest spasms with guilt when Steve glances over at Bucky’s barely-touched breakfast and says, “You already done with that?”

“It’s… a little too early,” Bucky says. “You know how it’s hard for me to eat when I first wake up.”

Steve nods understandingly, which is somehow worse than if he’d made a scene.

 

* * *

 

The thing about denying your body something it needs is that the brain becomes obsessed with it. Bucky’s head is full of thoughts of food and taste and fullness. He’d only had the crust of his toast at breakfast and spends the rest of the morning looking forward to his next meal, literally counting down the minutes until it will be an acceptable hour to start talking about preparing lunch. He knows it won’t give him nearly as much satisfaction as he needs, because he’s only going to be allowed to nibble at it, but at this point he doesn’t even care how little he’ll be eating, he just needs to know that _food is coming_.

Lunch is cheese tortellini. Bucky suggests they eat in front of the television, saying there’s a nature documentary on elephants that he’s been wanting to see. What he _doesn’t_ say is that he needs to make sure Steve is distracted enough for Bucky to be able to sneak little balls of pasta into his pockets and sleeves to throw out later.

Turns out Steve is actually really into the show about the elephants. He voices an admiration for their matriarchal society, and damn near sheds a tear himself when he learns about how elephants mourn their dead, covering their bodies with sticks and leaves and often returning to visit the ‘gravesite’ even months or years after the death.

“People need to learn to let go,” Bucky mutters before he can stop himself, his words soured with a bitterness that he doesn’t quite understand.

“They’re not people, they’re elephants,” Steve objects mildly.

“You know what I mean.”

There’s a pause, then Steve says, “Is that really what you think? That people should… That people _can_ … just… Let go? Just like that?”

“If it’s something that isn’t gonna change no matter how long you try to hold onto it, then, yeah,” Bucky says with a stubborn settling of his jaw.

He’s not really sure why he feels so confrontational all of a sudden. Volatile, almost. There’s something grating in his head like steel wool across a band of exposed nerves and normally he could silence the corrosive screech of his thoughts with a large pizza and a few boxes of Chinese takeout but that’s not exactly an option right now so it seems like all his venom is coming out in other ways.

Meanwhile, Steve is watching Bucky very carefully, making Bucky stiffen and wonder if Steve somehow knows he’s got several tortellinis hidden in various pockets of his clothing, but all Steve says is, “You’re not talking about the elephants anymore, are you.”

It’s not a question.

When Bucky doesn’t reply, Steve ploughs on ahead. “I don’t regret not having let you go, Buck. People warned me… Told me you might not ever be the same. And you’re not, I know that. I’m not the same person, either. I'll admit that in the beginning all I wanted was for everything to be able to go back to the way it was before... But I now know that’s not a possibility, so yes, I’ve let go of that. But that does not mean for one single second that I’m letting go of you.”

“I dunno,” Bucky mumbles, feeling quite tired and disoriented all of a sudden. “Forever is a long time.”

Steve forces out a bit of a ragged laugh. “Yeah. Nobody knows that more than us.”

“I don’t know if… it’s really important…”

“If what’s really important?”

“Having someone that remembers you,” Bucky replies, having abruptly switched his train of thought back to the matter of elephant grieving.

It takes Steve a moment to catch up with where Bucky’s brain has wandered off to.

“I don’t know,” he says, “I think it might be… nice. To have left some kind of lasting impact on the world, you know, like all that corny stuff about how you live on in those who love you.”

“I don’t want to be remembered,” Bucky murmurs distantly. “The things I’ve done… I wouldn’t _want_ people to—”

 _“That wasn’t you,”_ Steve cuts in, his voice almost a growl. “Listen. You’re going to be remembered as a hero. A good man. A good friend.”

Bucky just gives an unconvinced grunt. There are so many mistakes that he can’t take back. He knows Steve would just throw his own words right back at him – _you can’t change any of it, so let it go_. But it’s not that simple. He may not be able to change any of it, but he _might_ be able to atone for it. He can reclaim the body that had moved on without him and caused so much pain for so many people, and he can punish that body in a way that will teach it never to act out of turn again.

“Why are we talking about this right now anyway?” Steve asks all of a sudden, and he’s trying very hard to keep his tone lighthearted, but Bucky can pick up on the quavers between his syllables. “It’s not like either of us are goin’ anywhere, right?”

Bucky gives a slow, bleary nod. “No, you… Right. You’re right.”

They eat in relative silence for the rest of the meal. Steve offers to take Bucky’s dishes to the kitchen and Bucky gladly accepts, taking the opportunity to slip into the bathroom and empty his pockets of the dozen or so tortellinis he'd stashed there. He throws them into the toilet one by one, imagines them as little round ships each with a captain and crew, all doomed to drown.

 

* * *

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as always, please proceed with caution.
> 
> things also get a lil gross in this chapter :S

 

Somewhere along the way, Bucky’s fucked-up eating habits become less about guilt-driven obedience of HYDRA’s rules and more of a direct attack on the rules themselves. Bucky thinks to himself, _Wow!_ He’s managed to do what no amount of therapy or self-talk or support could ever do – stifle HYDRA’s insidious constant presence in his head. As long as his stomach is empty, his brain is, too. But it’s a very specific kind of empty. Different than the ache of long-term hunger, which he has come to discover is simply not enough.

In the beginning, Bucky vomited mostly in order to make up for his excesses. To dissipate that sickening feeling of guilt and dread that always settled at the pit of his stomach along with the weight of everything he’d eaten.

Now, while it is still indeed a means to an end, it has also become an end in and of itself.

It’s absolutely disgusting and he’d deny it in a heartbeat to anyone who asked, but Bucky has realised he’s come to enjoy the physical act of throwing up almost as much as he savours the subsequent silence. There’s just something about the sheer brutality of it that he cannot turn away from.

In therapy, he learned about the various ways in which the nervous system responds to danger. Survival instinct. Fight or flight and all that.

He learned that freezing was another one of those responses.

Freezing is what Bucky had often found himself doing under HYDRA – both metaphorically and very, very literally – and the humiliation and terror of that kind of helplessness is something that he vowed he’d never let himself experience again. When given the choice between action or inaction, he made a promise to always go for the former.

Hence why hunger alone is not an adequate means to the emptiness he so desperately chases.

Starving is inaction, passivity. Defined by absence, it is a crime of omission.

Bucky’s thing, on the other hand, is the absolute polar opposite. It’s more than merely an action, it’s an outright _assault_. The immediacy and intensity of its intent is what sets it apart from the simple emptiness of deprivation. It’s the difference between manslaughter and murder one.

It quickly escalates from petty quarrels to all-out war. Everything in Bucky’s life comes down to survival but it does not occur to him that there isn’t any defensive reasoning behind this; it’s merely pure, vicious brutality. Violence for the sake of violence, shooting not to kill, but with the even crueller intent to inflict the most suffering, for reasons that he can’t quite comprehend.

Now that he’s in it more for the vomiting than the eating, his surreptitious mini-sessions in the dead of night just aren’t cutting it anymore. He can no longer wait for Steve to be gone to engage in his little hobby, so he simply starts throwing up regular meals, which he can usually accomplish once a day by saying he’s having a shower. He may not be able to properly carry out the first half of his ritual but he’ll be damned if he is denied the second – the knock-out adrenaline rush, the flurry of endorphins followed by the relief of silent, trembling emptiness.

He probably shouldn’t be as surprised as he is when the heightened frequency of his habits starts to take its toll. Maybe it’s because he’d assumed the serum would keep him safe from the worst of it, but even then, the cracks are starting to show.

He is more than just physically starving at this point, he’s consumed by a _need_ that transcends hunger, as imminently urgent as the need for air but affecting far more than just his body. His hours have become utterly consumed by thoughts of food. He finds himself anticipating each meal with equal amounts of eagerness and dread because there is nothing he wants more _or_ less than to be able to eat. He fantasises about what he’s going to stuff himself with once he finally gets the chance. Looks through cookbooks and recipes and food blogs. There is not a single second of the day that food is not at the forefront of his mind, and it’s more maddening than any bodily effect of hunger could ever be.

Other things start to change, too. At first, he doesn’t understand what’s happening – why he’s forgetting things again, or why the hunted feeling is back in his bones – and it scares the shit out of him. He doesn’t want to go back to that place, _can’t_ go back to that place. He only just made it out by the skin of his teeth the first time around; he doesn’t think he has it in him to do it again.

At the same time, he is absolutely, completely, one hundred percent prepared to go at it alone even if it kills him, which is why he ignores the way Steve watches him with a renewed wariness, and pretends not to know what his therapist is talking about when she comments on how distracted he’s been lately.

Because he knows what he’s doing is fucked-up and wrong and anyone who finds out about it will want him to stop.

(The odd part, though, is how sometimes he wishes they would. The thrill of Getting Away With It has all but dried up, leaving an almost resentful desperation in its place. Maybe he doesn’t want to get away with it anymore. Maybe he wants to be found.)

And yet the closer anyone gets to figuring out what’s going on, the harder he works to keep it hidden.

Of all the secrets in the collection of shameful truths that make up his existence, this has somehow become the worst one. Worse than what he’s done to other people, worse than what _they_ had done to him.

At this point, he is fully aware that what he’s doing to himself isn’t normal. Not that there was ever a time when he truly believed it _was_ , but it sure was a hell of a lot easier to pretend otherwise when it was still, relatively speaking, all just fun and games. When he could reasonably convince himself that he had some modicum of control over it.

Nevertheless, he tells himself he can stop any time he wants, because he’s pretty sure that something is only a problem when you try to stop it but can’t, which means if he doesn’t actually try, he’ll never know whether or not he can’t, which means he probably can.

 

* * *

 

Bucky has worked out a pretty efficient system. He either wakes up too late for breakfast or says it’s too early for him to stomach anything, only pokes at his lunch, and then has more or less all of his dinner before he steps into the shower and gets rid of it.

He starts throwing up in the bathtub itself instead of in the toilet. It feels safer, somehow, doing it tucked away within nonjudgmental porcelain, with an opaque shower curtain keeping his awfulness hidden from the world. He also doesn’t have to worry as much about making a mess; he just makes sure to thoroughly hose down the tub when he’s done, then he emerges all clean and fruity-scented and looking like someone who definitely knows how to take care of himself.

(He has been known to go for weeks without bathing during the worst of his lows, so surely this newfound dedication to personal hygiene is also serving to demonstrate to Steve that Bucky is A-Okay.)

Bucky probably should have been able to see it coming with the noodles, though.

Dinner was a delicious linguine carbonara recipe that Bucky had found on the Internet, and the two of them were actually able to share a nice, almost _romantic_ meal together, all coy smiles hidden behind the rims of wine glasses and feet getting tangled up with each other beneath the table.

Afterwards, Steve gets up to clear the dishes and as he passes Bucky, who’s still seated (and preparing his exit strategy), he leans over and lays a gentle kiss on the side of Bucky’s mouth. Bucky smiles into Steve’s lips, following them as Steve slowly withdraws, but then suddenly Steve is actually jerking away from him in an abrupt fashion that makes no sense.

“Steve?” Bucky says, unable to keep the slight hurt out of his voice. “What’s— is something wrong?”

Steve just stands there for a moment, looking horribly uncomfortable, before he finally clears his throat and says awkwardly, “Were you, uh... Were you sick at all today?”

Bucky jumps to his feet, ignoring the way the whole room jumps with him and doesn’t seem to stop, and he realises a split-second too late that this is definitely an overreaction but, well, he can’t exactly take it back now.

“Fuck,” Steve mutters. “Forget it, I’m sorry. I just thought... It kind of smelled like— I’m sorry.”

Bucky is admittedly surprised that Steve even caught a whiff of it – Bucky thought he’d be in the clear since it’s been two days since he last puked, and he’s been tossing back mouthwash and breathmints like it’s going out of style. God, what if Steve’s smelled it on his breath long before this, but it’s only now that he’s dared to bring it up? Has Bucky not been doing as good a job hiding this as he thought?

“If this is your idea of subtly trying to hint that I need to brush my teeth more often, it’s rather uncouth,” Bucky sniffs after a moment, trying to pass it all off as a joke.

Steve doesn’t take the bait.

“Are you having trouble keeping your food down again?” he asks.

The genuine concern in his voice makes Bucky’s entire body ripple with shame and he can’t even bring himself to come up with a lie.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Steve says, stepping closer to Bucky and laying his hands on his shoulders. Bucky starts holding his breath without even realising it. “I know these coming months... with the anniversary of... It’s a hard time for both of us, so just... Will you talk about it with Dr. Sterling? Please?”

This whole time, Bucky has been trying to gauge exactly how much Steve knows, and he’s come to the conclusion that he’s probably in the clear for now because it appears that Steve just thinks this is a Trauma Thing. It’s funny, because not too long ago, Bucky would rather have died than admit to how much he was still being affected by what had been done to him, but now it’s become the perfect excuse.

“Yeah,” Bucky says distantly. “Yeah, of course I’ll talk about it with her.”

Steve looks relieved. He pats Bucky on the back, but Bucky shrinks away.

“I’m having a shower,” he mumbles, and hurries off to grab a towel and clean clothes before shutting himself in the washroom.

He can’t get into the tub fast enough, cranking the showerhead up to the strongest, loudest setting. He runs his human fingers beneath the hot spray, bends over, and shoves them into his mouth, jabbing away at that raw patch at the back of his throat that he’s become so terribly intimate with over these past couple of months.

It turns out that noodles are an absolute nightmare to get back up, especially since Bucky hadn’t had time to guzzle any water before coming into the washroom and apparently hadn’t chewed them well enough either, so a lot of them are coming up virtually intact, getting caught halfway up his throat and making him choke.

It clogs the fucking drain.

Bucky’s not sure how long he stands there with the shower head aimed directly at the drain, trying to get the water pressure to force the mess down, but it eventually becomes clear that it’s not going to work, and he’s now nearly ankle deep in murky bathwater that has chunks of bacon and pasta floating around in it.

Unsurprisingly, he panics.

The familiar tile of the shower wall blurs into unforgiving cement and suddenly nothing exists except for the overlapping twin terrors of a) getting caught by Steve, and b) being punished by HYDRA. He has to fix this. Fix this before Steve catches him, before Lukin forces him to drink it all, before before _before_ —

Before he even really realises what he’s doing, he’s gotten out of the bathtub and is sticking his fingers down the drain to scoop his vomit out so that it can be dropped into the toilet. Some inevitably trickles through his grip and gets all over the place but he’s so preoccupied with getting the shower unclogged that he doesn’t notice.

It’s only when the water finally starts flowing down the drain again that everything starts to register. He’s fucking kneeling on the bathroom floor, naked, dripping wet and spattered in puke, having just spent twenty minutes shovelling vomit out of the tub and into the toilet with his bare fucking hands, because apparently even _that_ was a more appealing option than letting anyone find out the truth.

He very briefly entertains the _slight_ possibility that he’s in  _a liiiittle_ over his head before deciding that this was just a very unfortunate anomaly and as long as he can keep it from happening again, everything will be okay.

“You were in there for a while,” Steve says mildly when he finally emerges from the washroom, shaky and unsure and not feeling quite real.

“Decided to also take a bath,” Bucky croaks.

He could swear that a look of suspicious concern flickers across Steve’s face, but he doesn’t actually say anything, so Bucky figures he just imagined it.

A part of him wants to scream. Doesn’t Steve see what he’s doing here? Doesn’t _anyone?_   Even though he knows he would deny it until his dying breath if anyone were to call him out on it doesn’t change the odd fact that he is hurt that it hasn’t happened yet.

Distantly, he wonders what it would take and if he’s willing to go that far.

 

* * *

 

“When’s the last time you had a physical?” Bucky’s therapist asks him that week.

Bucky’s entire body jolts in surprise before he can regain enough control to force a brusque laugh, remembering how just two days ago he’d been resentful that Steve hadn’t seemed to notice anything was wrong, and now that someone has, he wishes they hadn’t.

“You know I can’t get sick, doc,” he mutters.

“Not from viruses, maybe,” Dr. Sterling replies, “But there are other things that could be affecting your body, which is in turn having a negative impact on your mood.”

Bucky swallows hard. It hurts his throat.

He tries another approach.

“Well, you also know I don’t like doctors,” he says, meaning to sound somewhere between casual and dismissive, but instead the words come out all thin and shaky.

A blood test taken by Dr. Banner right after Bucky had come home is about the extent of the interaction Bucky has had with medical personnel in this ‘new’ life. Despite Bucky having made quite a scene, the experience in itself was not a wholly unpleasant one, but nevertheless the mere memory of it makes Bucky’s pulse pick up and his mind wander through all sorts of dangerous avenues he’d rather not be.

How much blood had _they_ taken from him, he wonders distractedly. How much of it was drawn out of him and into endless tubes and vials, how much pooled into the basins beneath operating tables or drained into the very earth itself. He remembers how the days smeared into each other in ever-darkening hues of red as he lay there thinking surely no human could possibly bleed for this long and not die, surely he’d soon have the relief of absolute nothingness...

But of course HYDRA never afforded him that kind of mercy, and his body kept renewing itself no matter how much his brain screamed at it to just _give up give up please give up_.

He sometimes still feels that irrational sense of betrayal towards his own body for keeping him alive despite his best efforts. It’s a sentiment that has become increasingly prominent lately, as his body continues to hold its own against the ever-intensifying assault he’s subjecting it to.

It _is_  a war after all, and he hates that his body has proven itself to be such a formidably stubborn opponent.

Fucking serum.

Then again, maybe it’s better this way. This way, his cycle of self-abuse can continue unendingly. It serves a dual purpose – the first and obvious being punishment, but he’s come to realise that it also has to do with empowerment. The people who hurt him before can’t hurt him anymore. That’s up to him now, and he gets to play both sides. By doing what he does to himself, he is both paying penance and seizing control, acting as both the punished and the punisher.

He is Prometheus and the eagle all rolled up in one.

Bucky tunes back into the present just in time to hear Dr. Sterling talking about the importance of self-care. Balanced diet blah blah blah staying active yadda yadda yadda getting enough sleep etcetera etcetera. He feels himself nod, but not much else.

The session can’t end quickly enough.

On the way home, he calls Steve to say he'll be late because he's grabbing a coffee, then he stops at a gas station where he buys a dozen donuts and a litre of diet soda, which disappear within fifteen minutes but take nearly an hour to get back up. It feels like golf balls are stuck in his throat. Wildly, he wonders what would happen if he were to choke to death here, if some poor Sunoco employee found him keeled over in this scummy gas station restroom over a toilet bowl filled with barely-digested chunks of Krispy Kreme.

Steve would find out. Everyone would find out. Maybe it would make the papers.

_Legendary assassin found dead in puddle of own vomit._

A hysterical laugh bubbles up in Bucky’s throat as puke sears his nostrils. God, how fucking embarrassing would _that_ be.

He decides he might as well live.

 

* * *

 

Bucky can’t stand having to keep his distance from Steve.

Ever since the incident where Steve had been able to smell something on Bucky’s breath, he’s been forcing himself to stay away from him. It’s actually been an incredibly simple stunt to pull off without even causing any suspicion, seeing as Bucky has already been known to go through times where he cannot stand to be touched, and Steve – patient, obliging Steve – has learned to just keep being there for Bucky in whatever other way he can and wait for him on the other side.

But just because he can get away with it so effortlessly doesn’t mean it’s easy.

For once it’s not an issue of needing more space to feel safe. Though Bucky does indeed long for closeness with Steve during those particular times, there is also a part of him that recoils at the very thought of it, the voice that he has to smother into silence again before things can go back to the way they were.

Right now, though, the distance Bucky forces himself to maintain has nothing to do with that voice, and _that’s_ what makes it so painful.

It’s also why, on a sleepy Sunday morning after having slept in his own room for two weeks straight, all Bucky wants to do is be as close to Steve as a person can be to another person without actually taking over the physical space they inhabit.

It’s been an unheard-of four days since he’s last vomited, so he goes for it.

He tiptoes into Steve’s bedroom. Steve is lying on his side with his back to Bucky, so Bucky hops up onto the bed and snuggles in behind him to become the big spoon, nudging up the bottom of Steve’s t-shirt and slipping his flesh hand beneath it to rest on Steve’s belly.

Steve awakens with a shudder and a gasp, which in turn startles Bucky to the point where he ends up backed up on the other side of the bed before he even realises it.

“Aww, shit, I’m sorry, Buck,” Steve says, looking apologetic. “It’s just… Your arm must not be heated up yet, ‘cause that was like getting tickled by an icicle.”

Bucky touches his metal hand and frowns.

“I used my real hand, though,” he says.

Steve’s eyes furrow in confusion and he shifts closer to Bucky before he asks, “Can I—?”

Bucky nods. Steve reaches out to take Bucky’s flesh hand in both his own and his frown deepens.

“This one’s so cold, too,” he murmurs, rubbing it between his palms.

Bucky just stares at it, feeling oddly detached from it. Sometimes it’s still strange to see his hand next to Steve’s, to have them matching up in size instead of Steve’s being swallowed up by his. Steve’s hands used to shake all the time, clammy and fever-frail, but now it’s Bucky whose fingers flutter until Steve cups them in his own like pressing a flower in the pages of a dictionary between _recovery_ and _resilience_.

“You’ve always run warm,” Bucky mumbles after a moment.

There’s a longer silence, then Steve says bluntly, “You look like hell, Buck.”

Bucky yanks his hand from Steve’s grasp with perhaps more force than is necessary.

He hadn’t thought it was that obvious, which he now realises was an incredibly stupid thing to think, because it's definitely noticeable. The puffy cheeks and sallow skin. Reddened watery eyes never without a cushion of dark circles. Lifeless hair that falls out in the shower and clogs the drain. The abrasions on the knuckles of his index and middle fingers where they're repeatedly scraping against his acid-worn teeth as he shoves them down his throat.

“Wh-hu—” Bucky's voice dries up in his sandpaper-lined throat and he swallows painfully several times before managing a slightly more articulate, “What?”

“I’ve been worried for a while now but haven’t said anything because I know how much you hate it when I get all fussy,” Steve chatters on nervously, “But I— look, if things are getting... bad... You can tell me. I’d rather hear even the worst news than be worrying about what you might be hiding from me.”

“I can’t get sick,” is all Bucky says, trying not to sound too defensive.

Steve’s jaw sets at a grim, unhappy angle. “I know you can’t. But with the way you’ve been eating lately – or _not_ eating – I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s really messing with your body.”

“You know how I get sometimes, Steve,” Bucky insists. “I— it’s hard to eat sometimes. The textures of... and I just— it’s just hard, okay? It’s not like I’m not doing it on purpose.”

Steve raises an eyebrow at that last sentence and Bucky mentally kicks himself for it. Definitely over-defensive.

“I’m trying my best,” Bucky whispers, knowing full well the effect his words will have, and just as predicted, Steve lets out a sad-sounding sigh, shoulders dropping in defeat.

“I know you are, Buck,” he says, reaching out and brushing a rogue strand of hair out of Bucky’s eyes.

Bucky practically shudders at the contact and follows Steve’s hand as it withdraws until he’s leaned forward so far that he’s practically doubled over on the bed. Steve chuckles affectionately and hauls Bucky up a little so that he can rest his head in Steve’s lap, where he continues to run his fingers through Bucky’s hair and rub soothing circles into his scalp.

Bucky feels disproportionately truimphant that the conversation has ended, like he’s managed to guard some truly sacred secret, even though it really wasn’t too difficult a task at all.

In fact, hiding his tracks has been so easy that it’s almost laughable. His excuses are bought into very quickly. They sound thoroughly pathetic to his own ears, but probably only because he knows the truth – to an outsider it all must come off as at least relatively understandable, even if only because there’s no other plausible explanation. Steve is clearly at an utter loss as to what could be wrong, and Bucky can’t even really blame him for it. What he’s doing is so fucked-up and likely so far beyond Steve’s realm of comprehension that Bucky wouldn’t be surprised if Steve caught him red-handed (puke-handed?) and still didn’t understand what was going on.

After all, why would he? This isn’t exactly the first thing that would pop into anyone’s mind when it comes to possible problems that Bucky might be having. Probably not even the second or third, either.

Bucky closes his eyes. For a moment, he seriously considers telling Steve everything. About how he swoops from being a bundle of lashing madness into a blank sheet of biological activity, from feeling too much to feeling too little, and there is only one way to even himself out. How the idea of total erasure has always been lurking in the far recesses of his mind as a viable option, should push come to shove.

How he’s sorry, how sorry he is, he’s so, so sorry.

 

* * *

 

He starts eating normal-sized meals after that, to throw Steve off.

It’s almost a relief, actually, the way Steve’s suspicions have given Bucky the justification he needs to let himself eat properly. An unspoken, implied permission that makes it Okay, because the fact that his body needs the nourishment is apparently not a good enough reason on its own.

For a little while, eating well keeps him from feeling the godawful urge to go out and stuff his face with everything he sees. The obsessive thoughts about food die down. Now he’s no longer reduced to sneaking into the kitchen at night and picking his leftovers out of the garbage because he’s so fucking hungry and has convinced himself that it Doesn’t Count as breaking the rules if he's eating out of the trash.

He still vomits after most meals – sometimes it’s not even on purpose, he just can’t seem to keep it down, and there’s been more than one mortifying occasion when he’s had to stop what he was doing and hold very still as he swallowed down the bile that was starting to rise up in his throat – but when he goes over a week without overeating, he starts to feel silly for ever having felt like this was becoming a problem.

(The fact that every night there seems to be more blood in the toilet bowl is irrelevant. So is the fact that he can’t hold a proper conversation without drifting off halfway through, and how his voice sounds like the walls of his throat are made of sandpaper, as well as the way he’s been spending more and more time crouched on the bathroom floor with his head between his knees because he’s drained and dizzy and aching. It’s just his body. It’s been through worse. It will heal.)

However, combined with the way it’s been getting harder and harder to think straight, Bucky’s complacency eventually makes him careless.

He’s curled up on his bed after dinner, trying to stop shaking, when Steve comes into the room and says, “Why didn’t you tell me you were sick?” and Bucky’s entire world comes to a screeching halt.

He tries to move, to speak, but he can’t. He’s not even breathing. He wouldn’t be surprised if his blood has frozen over in his veins.

“Buck?” Steve presses worriedly.

Bucky shakes himself out of his shocked daze and says, “W-what?”

“You, uh, you forgot to flush the toilet.”

“No, I didn’t,” Bucky says before he can stop himself.

He’s one hundred percent certain he didn’t forget. He remembers reaching for the little handle, remembers how impossibly far away it had seemed, and, when he finally closed his hand around it, how heavy it had felt.

...Wait.

Fuck.

He must not have pressed it down hard enough. Their toilet is a little fussy – if the handle is released too quickly, the flush ends up being too weak to get rid of everything. Bucky should have known better than to leave the bathroom without double and triple checking that everything had gone down.

Steve comes to sit down next to Bucky on the bed, looking anxious and sad.

“I can’t get sick,” Bucky mumbles, and if he sounds desperate, it’s because he is.

“There are a lot of ways to get sick,” Steve says gently, “And even we aren’t immune to all of them.”

Bucky curls up into an even tighter ball on the bed and buries his face into the sheets so that he doesn’t have to see the pained look on Steve’s face. He hates worrying Steve, but at the same time he can’t help but to also feel a vague resentment – it’s not Bucky’s problem if Steve thinks literally everything is his fault. The guy probably hates himself for _breathing_ because he thinks it contributes to the greenhouse effect.

Steve asks, “What’s going on, Buck?”

As in _What’s Eating Bucky Barnes._

Except of course it’s more like _What’s Bucky Barnes Eating._

(The answer to both questions would be sometimes nothing, sometimes everything.)

Steve asks, “Has something bad happened recently?”

Asks, “Have you talked to Dr. Sterling about this?”

Asks, “Is there anything I can do?”

Too many questions.

The interrogation continues for what feels like an eternity, but Bucky, like the perfect spy, does not fold. Just grinds his crumbling teeth together like he’s biting down on a cyanide capsule, and the one-sided conversation ends with neither party having gained a thing.

 

* * *

 

The following day, Bucky experiments with eating less, hoping that if he doesn’t have as much in his stomach, he won’t feel such an overwhelming urge to empty it out. It works in that he doesn’t vomit at all that night, but also has the drawback of attracting Steve’s attention.

He badgers Bucky constantly, whether it’s a plaintive, “You gotta eat _something_ , Buck,” or the slightly more passive-aggressive, “C’mon, at least have a bite, I made it just for you.”

It’s in between all these indirect orders that Bucky realises something has profoundly changed. It used to be that a little nudge from Steve would serve as the authorisation Bucky needed in order to be able to let himself eat. It was permission. It meant eating was Allowed.

Not anymore.

Now, not even a go-ahead from Steve is a sufficient excuse to get Bucky to eat. Steve’s word no longer factors into The Rules, and Bucky’s not sure what this means for the rest of them.

He’s sitting at the kitchen table desperately trying to figure it all out when he sees Steve in his peripheral vision, approaching him, and Bucky automatically starts coming up with excuses for why he can’t eat, because surely the next words out of Steve’s mouth are going to have something to do with that.

And they do, but not quite in the way that Bucky had been expecting.

Instead of the usual, “Let’s have a snack,” or, “Please, just a few crackers,” that are customary questions around this time of day between lunch and dinner, Steve says,

“You hungry?”

And Bucky is left reeling.

Though this is far from being the first time someone has made this inquiry to him after all his little food neuroses began in earnest, it is the first time he’s realised the true extent to which he does not know the answer.

_Are you hungry?_

It’s a remarkably simple question, really. Even though there is a wide range of possible responses, the bottom line is that people are supposed to be able to pinpoint where they fall on the scale – whether it’s “no” or “a little” or “not yet” or “yes” – and then they are supposed to act accordingly. After all, there are only two possible subsequent courses of action, each easily determined by the answer to the question: if yes, eat. If not, don’t eat.

Bucky, however, has lost all sense not only of how to gauge his hunger, but also of what to do about it. It has long ceased to be about nourishment and instead has become this fraught, hostile drive inside of him that he resents and fears. He can no longer interpret the physical sensations related to hunger and satiation. He could be wanting to eat because his body needs food, or it could be because he needs something that _isn’t_ food, or it could be because he’s sad or angry or anxious or guilty or scared. Hell, even when he’s not really any of these things, he might still eat, because he needs the rush that comes with getting it all back out again, the deathlike relief of that exhausted emptiness.

In the end, though, it’s still all about _need_ , and _that’s_ what disgusts him the most. He hates that very thought of it, its connotations of vulnerability and weakness. He hates that he has not been able to completely banish the concept from his life.

So he banishes what little else he can.

“No,” he says finally, gripped by an oddly detached feeling of superiority, “No, I’m not hungry.”

Steve makes a concerned noise and comes over to sit at the kitchen table, across from Bucky, who resolutely averts his gaze.

“I’m worried about you,” Steve says softly.

“Don’t be,” Bucky snaps.

He knows he’s being both churlish and childish and Steve doesn’t deserve any of this right now, but to his surprise, Steve simply laughs a little.

“God,” he says, “Was this how bad it was for you when we were growing up, whenever you’d try to take care of me? Was I really this—”

“Stubborn?” Bucky supplies, but he’s smiling too, now. “Pigheaded?”

“I was gonna say ‘proud,’” Steve sniffs, “But… yeah. Stubborn.”

“Man, you were _worse,_ ” Bucky says with a fond grin. “Not only did you not let me worry over you, you also insisted there was nothing to worry about. You were once practically on your goddamn deathbed and trying to make plans to go see a movie the next day.”

“What can I say,” Steve murmurs, voice quiet all of a sudden. “Denial is a force to be reckoned with.”

There’s something about the way Steve says this that makes Bucky shiver.

“Wait…” he says slowly, as something starts to dawn on him. “You… It wasn’t just about pride and stubbornness, was it. It was also…”

“Yeah,” Steve cuts in, forcing a weak smile that could use a little more on the upcurve. “It was also... fear. I—I was scared. I didn’t want to die. Not like that.”

Bucky gets up from his seat and kneels down next to Steve’s chair, reaching up to wrap his arms around Steve’s waist as he lays his head on Steve’s thigh. Steve automatically starts to run his hands through Bucky’s hair.

“I’m sorry,” Bucky whispers. “I should’ve… All those times I just gave you shit for it, thinkin’ you were just being difficult, but… I should’a realised it was a way to cope with being… scared. Hell, I did the same thing, too. ‘Hey Stevie, you’re not gonna die, at least not until you pay me the two cents you owe me for losin’ that bet we made.’” Bucky pauses, chuckles. “I guess I just never thought of you as someone who’s scared of death, is all.”

Steve looks down at him, raising an bemused eyebrow. “Seriously, Buck? We were kids. Of course I was scared of death.”

“Never woulda guessed it,” Bucky says sincerely. “You were always so… composed. Always holding it together better than everyone around you. Me very much included.”

Steve extricates himself from Bucky’s grasp and slides down to the floor next to him, where they sit for a long time, just leaning against one another.

“I’ve missed this, Buck,” Steve sighs, breaking the silence.

“Missed what? Reminiscing about shit times?”

“No, just… Talking. Being open. Honest.”

Bucky knows it’s probably not Steve’s intention, but he can’t help but to interpret his words as a passive-aggressive jab at how Bucky has been hiding things lately.

He stiffens, stands up.

“Buck?” Steve asks, looking up at him with confusion on his face.

Bucky says, “I need to lie down for a bit,” and disappears into his bedroom before Steve can get a word in edgewise.

He’s shaking for some reason. Maybe it was the discussion of the past and how it reminded him he’d never be that man again, or maybe it was because he felt guilty lying to Steve, but whatever it is, it’s gotten him all keyed-up and he only knows one way to calm himself down again.

With quaking hands, he digs into the emergency reserves at the back of his closet and comes up with a box of chocolate chip cookies, a nearly-finished jumbo bag of potato chips, and a bottle of water.

He stares at them for a long time as a predicament occurs to him.

He can’t eat. Not when he’s in here with no way to get rid of it, and he doesn’t want to risk going to the bathroom to do it when Steve is already so suspicious.

But he also can’t _not_ eat, either, because he feels like he’s going to burst open if he doesn’t empty himself out; he’s actually clammy-skinned and out of breath from the exertion it’s taking him to not just start stuffing his face right then and there.

To eat or not to eat.

Well, there’s really no question at all.

He’s going to eat. The real problem is figuring out what to do after that.

But he’ll burn that bridge when he comes to it.

He turns on the radio to provide some covering noise, hooks a chair beneath the doorknob so Steve won’t be able to burst in on him (not that he’s ever entered Bucky’s room without knocking first, but you can never be too careful), and goes to town.

He rips open the bag of cookies, empties out two rows of them, and fills those rows with water from the bottle. He soaks the cookies in the water before he scarfs them down because they’re easier to to get back up when they’re soggy like that – ideally this would be done with milk, but he doesn’t exactly have that luxury at the moment. After that, he finishes up the last of what’s in the bag of chips, making sure to chew them thoroughly so they won’t scratch his throat. He needs to keep what is about to happen as quick and soundless as possible.

The only question now, is _how_ is it going to happen.

He briefly considers puking into an old sock, but he thinks there’s too high a likelihood of the sock overflowing or otherwise being too narrow to aim into. Then he thinks about stripping the pillowcase from his bed and using that, but what if he gets caught by Steve on his way to the linens closet later? He’d have to be able to explain why he suddenly needs a new pillowcase.

He’s just about to give into despair and head to the washroom when he realises he’s been holding the solution in his hands the entire time: the now-empty bag of chips.

He throws up into it, then wraps it up in several old shirts that he’ll never wear again before he stuffs the bundle into the very back of his closet.

A quick spritz of air freshener, removing the chair out from under the doorknob and placing it back at the desk, and it’s like nothing ever happened.

This is what Bucky was made to do. The only thing he's good for. While most people are praised for being able to make something from nothing, Bucky’s specialty lies in the reverse. He makes nothing out of something. That is, he makes things disappear. He processes his world in areas of negative space. Sees things not in terms of what can be added, but what can be taken away.

After all, sometimes to create the perfect world, you first have to tear the old one down.

He supposes this might also apply to people.  Bodies.  Selves.

 

* * *

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> another kind of gross chapter in which nothing is really resolved but i swear it doesn't end in complete misery ok

 

It’s been two weeks since Steve’s last away mission, meaning it’s been two weeks of Bucky having to restrict himself to only throwing up his dinners under the guise of having a shower, or, once in a blue moon, eating the stash of food in his closet and tiptoeing to the bathroom in the dead of night.

He’s getting desperate.

“You haven’t gone away with the Avengers for a while,” he says eventually, trying to sound as casual as possible, like it’s no big deal. Like he’s _not_ waiting to have the house to himself so that he can eat everything in it. “What, the world not need saving anymore or something?”

Steve glances briefly over at him before his eyes fix intently on the ground and he says quietly, “I don’t— I’ve been worried about you. I don’t want you to be alone if you’re having a tough time.”

Bucky’s chest tightens with a bizarre mixture of irritation and shame. Despite all Steve’s maudlin talk about how he’d rather fight a thousand wars as long as he had Bucky by his side than have to live even the most comfortable existence without him, Bucky has always been intensely, agonisingly aware of how much Steve has given up for him. Even though things obviously aren’t nearly as bad now that Bucky can more or less take care of himself on most days, he still hates the thought of being a burden. He knows just how much work is required to put up with him, with all his little neuroses and his countless psychological tripwires, and he would not blame anyone for giving up on him or just otherwise not being able to handle having so much of him in their life.

And yet, Steve is here. A constant, unwavering presence, regardless of how difficult Bucky makes it to be around him sometimes, and his guilt about that weighs heavy at the very pit of his stomach even after everything else has been emptied out.

He feels like a fraud. Like he’s duped Steve into thinking he’s a better person than he really is, and he half-hopes that one day Steve will finally come to his fucking senses and see the truth, because at least then Bucky won’t have to keep up this charade any longer. Steve deserves better than to be deceived like this. And yet, at the same time, Bucky is so scared of disappointing him that he’ll continue to play the part for as long as Steve continues to be willing to buy it, because Steve also doesn’t deserve to have to discover that one of the few sources of happiness in his life is actually a complete forgery.

“I don’t need a fucking babysitter,” Bucky replies after a moment with perhaps more hostility is warranted.

“Then maybe you should make sure you can actually take care of yourself,” Steve snaps.

His tone and words are startling. Bucky knows Steve is no pushover, knows how much of a hothead he can be, but the one exception to that rule has always been Bucky. They’ve never shied away from being snippy with one another, but they’ve always known exactly how much nastiness the other can take and stopped before it reached that point. Now, especially, Steve has exhibited an unbelievable amount of patience when it comes to Bucky, rolling with the punches, taking all Bucky’s bad days along with the good.

Maybe Bucky just wanted to make Steve hit back for once.

“You’re one to fucking talk,” he hisses, jumping to his feet and ignoring the way everything goes fuzzy around the edges for longer than usual. “You haven’t changed one bit from when we were kids. You still see yourself as... as _disposable_. But not everything is worth dying for, Steve. And it— it’s even worse now that you’re all ‘super’ because you think you’re fucking invincible, but you’re _not.”_

“That’s not true,” Steve says quietly, all the fight abruptly sucked out of him.

This throws Bucky off even more than the initial outburst and he blinks a few times, wondering what the fuck just happened. He sits back down on the couch again.

“Uh, hate to break it to you, pal,” he says, trying to lighten the mood, “But even the serum has its limits.”

“No, no, yeah, I know that,” Steve mutters distractedly. “I’m not talking about... I mean, everything you said about me... It was true, to an extent. But I think there’s a big difference between thinking everything is worth dying for and feeling like nothing’s worth living for, even if the end result is more or less the same.”

“No shit there’s a difference! They’re like, practically opposite things. If someone thinks nothing’s worth living for, then they sure as hell don’t have anything they think is worth dying for.”

“I managed to make up a few.”

“Yeah. Well. Don’t you ever fucking do that again.”

“I won’t have to,” Steve insists. “Things are different now.”

The _I have you_ is unspoken but might as well have been blaring out on a loudspeaker for all the world to hear.

“Don’t,” Bucky says warningly.

“I know. I’m sorry. It’s fucked-up and not fair to you, and so fucking selfish, but I—” Steve buries his face in Bucky’s shoulder to stifle what may or may not be a small sob, “—Buck, I can’t lose you. Not again.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Bucky murmurs, suddenly feeling horribly, quietly sad.

For a moment, he thinks about telling Steve everything, but that tiny possibility is soon buried beneath a frantic search for ways to appear Okay so that Steve won’t feel the need to stay home with him anymore, so that he will leave the house and Bucky can finally eat and vomit for hours straight. Maybe days.

 

* * *

 

When he gets the idea, he’s surprised and frankly a bit disappointed in himself for not having come up with it sooner.

He cancels his therapy appointment that week without telling Steve so that he can use that hour in... a different way.

He’s shaking as he gets behind the wheel of his car, dizzy with an anticipation high not unlike the fluttering lightness that he craves so badly. He didn’t realise it was possible to feel something so intensely in his body when it was ostensibly all in his head. For a moment, all this _need_ inside of him is enough to overwhelm his body’s other grievances that have been plaguing him nonstop – the perpetual stomach pain, the constant headache, the sore throat. He can’t remember the last time he did not hurt _somewhere_ , every part of his body staging its own counterattack against the siege he’s been holding it under, but none of that seems to matter anymore. Soon, he’ll have crushed their petty protests beneath the sole of his boot.

Soon he’ll have his silence.

He doesn’t even know what to do with himself, where to start. Normally he psychs himself out ahead of time, fantasising about exactly what he’s going to eat, but it feels like it’s been so long since he’s been able to do this that he doesn’t even care about the specifics anymore, he just needs to make it happen.

He’d half-hoped that being forced to abstain from truly indulging in his habit for so long would make it easier for him to stop completely, but that has proven itself to be very much _not_ the case. Instead of gaining confidence from the fact that he was able to go without a real binge for over two weeks, regardless of how agonisingly difficult it was, it’s as though all the hunger he’s been struggling to stave off has descended upon him all at once.

He decides he doesn’t want to commit to any meal-sized servings, instead preferring to be able to nibble on a bunch of different things, as if to make up for all the flavours and sensations he’s been missing out on, so he bypasses the fast food drive-throughs in favour of a big grocery store chain.

He grabs a shopping cart and fills it up with anything he’ll be able to eat with his hands. Chips. Lucky Charms. Bread. Oreos, for old times’ sake. Ridiculously-named Hostess snacks – Twinkies, Ho-Hos, Ding-Dongs. A gallon of diet Coke to wash it all down.

He has enough money for all of it, so who knows why he pockets some weird random shit that he probably won’t ever eat – a jar of baby food, a can of tuna.

It’s as though all rational thought has been evicted from his brain. He doesn’t feel there at all. A ghost, they used to call him. But ghosts don’t hunger, don’t need. He doesn’t know _what_ he is right now - caught between realms, perhaps, vacillating between the surreal and hyper-real.

Back in the car, he starts off with the Oreos. Through the roar of _moremoremore_ in his head, he can’t help but to think back to when this all began. Even though the Oreo has kind of become weirdly symbolic of him going off the deep end, he realises that it’s all been a long time coming. He’s always sort of suspected that he had something awful and ravenous inside of him that needed to be suppressed at all costs. Maybe this drive had been there from the very beginning, coiled inside him like some cold, insidious snake.

Another part of him wonders why he’s doing this. Before, he’s almost always had some sort of reason, with varying levels of actual rationality, but right now, he has the sneaking suspicion that he’s only doing it because he can. He saw the opportunity, so he seized it. It’s become a habit. Something ingrained in him just like all the other shitty adaptations his brain has decided to implement in order to survive.

If this is survival then why does it feel so much like dying?

He’ll figure out the answer to that later.

 

* * *

 

That night after dinner, before Bucky can excuse himself to the washroom, Steve announces that _he’s_ taking a shower.

It takes every ounce of Bucky’s willpower to keep the shock from showing on his face.

“Can... Can I go first?” he asks meekly.

Steve scrutinises him for what feels like an uncomfortably long time before his face breaks into a sly grin and he says, “We can go together.”

This is the absolute last thing that Bucky wants.

He knows how his body looks. For a while, when Steve was still going away on missions and Bucky was able to stuff his face as often as several times a day, the evidence of his activities was only visible in his swollen cheeks and bleary eyes - he didn’t noticeably lose any weight, since even with the vomiting, he was still consuming far more than what was normal, even for his metabolism. But now, with breakfast and lunch being virtually nonexistent and dinner always ending up down the drain, it’s started to show. His hipbones steep hills, ribcage like a staircase.

It’s disgusting and comforting at the same time. Proof of both sick, triumphant success and humiliating, drenching failure.

He knows that if he were to compare how he looks now to one of the old pictures of himself from Steve’s collection, they would look like two completely different people.

Then again, maybe it’s better this way. No false advertising. What you see is really what you get.

And yet Steve _still_ doesn’t seem to fucking get it, and Bucky cannot for the life of him figure out why.

“No thanks,” Bucky hears himself say.

“I’ll be quick,” Steve promises.

He leans in to plant a tiny kiss on Bucky’s cheek but Bucky gracelessly jerks away, causing Steve to frown.

“Sorry,” he says, voice a blend of hurt confusion and concern.

“Not your fault,” Bucky manages to grind out. He would explain himself better, work harder to make sure Steve didn’t feel bad about it, but he’s too fucking tired.

Steve lingers for a moment, seemingly unsure of whether or not to pursue the matter, but ultimately he just disappears into the bathroom without a word, leaving Bucky wondering what the fuck he’s going to do with himself now.

He could go in the kitchen sink, but it’s too out in the open, too exposed. If Steve were to so much as poke his head out of the hallway, he’d see. And what if he clogs the drain? Thankfully that hasn’t happened again after the bathtub incident, but Bucky certainly doesn’t want to risk it.

His mind races in a desperate search for other options. A plastic bag. The garbage can. But none of those would work because he’d need to get rid of it somehow.

Out the fucking window...?

Unless...

He likes to think that a part of him is completely grossed out by what he’s about to do, but the truth is that all he can feel is utter shuddering relief.

He goes to the cupboard and takes out a few of the plastic Tupperware containers that they sometimes use to hold leftovers. He brings them to his room, where he vomits quietly into them, closes the lids, and hides them in his closet along with all the half-eaten bags of chips and empty candy wrappers.

Easy as pie.

Incidentally, he could really go for a fruit cobbler right now.

 

* * *

 

After that, Bucky starts alternating between his shower excuse and retreating to his bedroom for some ‘alone time.’ Steve has always made it very clear that Bucky’s room is his space; he never enters it without permission, doesn’t ask what Bucky is up to when he’s in there or why he always keeps the door closed.

It’s yet another kindness from Steve that Bucky is taking merciless advantage of.

He’d feel more guilty about it if it wasn’t such a fucking lifesaver.

 

* * *

 

Bucky doesn’t realise he’s fallen behind on emptying out the vomit-filled Tupperwares and returning them to the kitchen until one day Steve makes a confused noise as he’s rummaging through the pantry looking for something to store the extra servings of sweet potato soup that they’d made.

Bucky starts laughing and laughing and can’t stop.

 

* * *

 

It starts out like any other day.

Bucky wakes up with a pounding headache. Picks at his breakfast. Nibbles at his lunch. Scarfs down all of his dinner, then goes to have a ‘shower.’

It’s after that that things start to deviate from the script.

He opens the door and Steve is standing right fucking there.

“What the fuck?” Bucky says.

Steve asks, “Are you doing it on purpose?”

The laugh that Bucky spits out sounds hollow even to his own ears.

“Jesus, Steve,” he mutters.

“Are you?”

Bucky grits his teeth. “I don’t have to talk about this with you.”

It’s the wrong thing to say. Bucky knows this from the moment the words are tumbling thoughtlessly out of his mouth but he feels like an animal backed into a corner whose only option is to lash out.

“I was, uh, doing some reading,” Steve chatters on, as if Bucky hadn’t said anything, “And... well... Have you ever heard of bulimia?”

Bucky bristles. Of course he has. He’s not stupid. But this... this is different. It _has_ to be.

“Do I look like a teenage girl who’s trying to fit into a prom dress?” he snaps.

Steve frowns. “That’s not... Bucky, you’re really sick.”

“You think I don’t fucking know that? My whole life... Ever since I came back, that’s all people have been telling me. ‘You’re sick.’ ‘It’s not your fault.’ I’m tired of hearing how broken I am.”

“I didn’t mean it like th—”

“Whatever.”

Bucky is so fucking _done_ with this conversation. He pushes past Steve and into his bedroom, but Steve follows before Bucky can stop him and his reaction upon entering the room is almost immediate – nose wrinkling in disgust, brow furrowed in vague confusion.

“What— what’s that smell?”

Bucky doesn’t think he’s ever been more mortified in his entire life. He just stands there rooted in place as Steve steps further into the bedroom and starts poking around. A part of him is screaming at himself to _fucking do something_ , to stop Steve before it’s too late, but he can’t seem to make a sound. The inevitability of what is about to happen is paralysing. There’s no way he’ll be able to lie his way out of this one, so he doesn’t even bother to try.

Steve reaches the closet.

Kneels down, nudges aside the layers of clothing on the floor.

He says, “Oh my god.”

Bucky starts to say _it’s not what it looks like_ before he realises just how fucking ridiculous that would sound, because what it looks like is that he’s been hoarding containers of his own vomit in his closet, which is exactly what it is.

Steve stands back up and faces Bucky with wet, widened eyes.

“Bucky,” he breathes, “What’s... What have you been doing in here?”

Bucky doesn’t look at him. He literally can’t breathe through the shame, which strikes him as odd considering the arguably more humiliating positions he’s found himself in over the course of the past seventy years, but the difference right now is that it’s _Steve_ he’s letting down.

“Bucky, please,” Steve says, and Bucky doesn’t know what Steve is asking of him but he’s pretty sure he can’t provide it.

“I’m going out,” he announces abruptly.

Steve is after him in an instant, reaching out and grabbing Bucky by the arm before he can stop himself.

To his credit, Bucky doesn’t even flinch, just glares at Steve until he withdraws.

“We need to talk about this,” Steve says.

Says, “Please, don’t go.”

Bucky goes anyway.

He forgets to take a jacket, but _does_ remember to bring his wallet. Because there’s only one thing on his mind right now, and he’ll need money to get it.

He’s out the door in a blur and his phone is ringing before he’s even gotten into the car, but Steve doesn’t actually come after him, and Bucky finds himself feeling oddly betrayed by that.

Bitterly, pettily, he thinks about how bad Steve would feel if this ended up being the last time he ever saw Bucky, but that resentment lasts only about a fraction of a second before it’s replaced with guilt.

The last thing he wants is to hurt Steve even more than he already has.

And yet, here he is.

The phone rings again.

He could go back inside, he thinks. He could go back inside and collapse into Steve’s familiar arms and say _help me_ and Be Saved.

Except he knows better than to believe that that’s how things work.

He starts the engine. He doesn’t have any particular destination in mind, just drives until he hits a gas station and figures this is as good a starting point as any.

A jumbo blue slushie. Six chocolate bars. A bag of Cheetos. A bottle of Fanta. He locks himself in the gas station washroom, where they go down in that order and come up in reverse, a revolting slop of orange and brown and then finally a startling blue.

Next.

The single-mindedness of his task is unlike anything he’s ever felt, in this life at least. As himself. He could be the Winter Soldier again, consumed by deadly, unstoppable purpose, sent off on some mission that he doesn’t understand, just knows that it’s a matter of life or death.

There is a McDonalds just down the street, calling to him like a fluorescent beacon, and normally he only likes to visit fast food restaurants with a drive-through, but even though this one doesn’t have one, he’s so desperate to keep going that he doesn’t care.

He probably looks like hell, still clammy-skinned and out of breath, but he manages to slap on a most convincingly charming grin when the woman behind the counter takes his order. He has his phone out, in plain sight, and makes a point of glancing down at it repeatedly so that it’ll look like he’s trying to juggle several people’s requests at once.

Because certainly no one would order two Big Macs, a third pounder with bacon, ten chicken nuggets, two large fries and a McFlurry all for themselves. At the last minute, he also remembers to ask for three drinks.

“You’re the delivery boy today, huh?” the woman behind the cash register says, nodding towards the bags that are piling up on the counter.

Bucky laughs a bit too loudly. “Yeah. Somethin’ like that.”

When his whole order finally comes, he hurries back into his car. About three quarters of the way through, he grabs one of the motion sickness bags that they keep in the glove compartment and vomits into it. It takes two bags before he stops, and by then he’s shaking so hard that it takes him several tries to seal them shut, his fingers useless purple ribbons that refuse to do what he tells them to.

He finishes the rest of the food, uses one more motion sickness bag, then gets out of the car on unsteady legs to throw them in the trash. He just barely makes it back before his knees are buckling and he’s practically collapsing into the front seat. There is a sharp, tightening pain in his chest, like his ribcage is shrinking and his heart is being crushed within it, thrashing and shrieking in increasingly desperate protest.

Not for the first time, it occurs to him that he could die from this.

Of course, he probably won’t, because surely HYDRA wouldn’t have let their precious weapon be so weak as to be felled by a bad stomach flu, but it’s nevertheless an... intriguing... concept. Perhaps one to be investigated further.

But not now. He can’t stay here. Like a shark, he has to keep moving or he’ll drown.

Onward.

He can see the Wendy’s restaurant right from where he’s sitting in his car.

It’s barely a block away, but some distant part of him acknowledges that he probably shouldn’t be behind the wheel in the state he’s in right now – that state being half out of his mind with guilt and panic and disgust and practically blinded by the pounding in his skull that feels like his pulse is trying to punch its way out of his head through the backs of his eyes. He couldn’t actually care less if he got into some huge accident and died, but it would be a pity to wreck such a perfectly nice car.

He manages to reach the Wendy’s drive-through lane without incident. The real challenge is ordering. Again, he pretends he’s on his phone, making it sound like he’s discussing menu options with someone on the other line, and he can tell the drive-through worker is getting confused because not only is he taking so long to order, but he also doesn’t seem to be able to talk properly. The words stick together in odd ways in his mouth and emerge all crunched up through his chattering teeth. He keeps drifting off in the middle of his sentences and the poor kid taking his order has to ask Bucky to repeat nearly everything he says.

He winds up with every variation of the Junior Burger that they have – if they’re for kids or whatever, then it doesn’t matter that he’s having two of each, right? An adult his size should not be eating only _one_ of a junior-sized burger. That would just be _silly_.

Again, he brings his bags of food to the car and eats them there. He honestly doesn’t know how he’s even managing to get anything into his stomach anymore and yet he doesn’t stop. He eats until he looks like he’s pregnant. Until it hurts so badly that he literally can’t fucking move and his eyes flood with involuntary tears as he curls over his obscenely distended belly with a low, abject groan.

This is it, he thinks. He’s going to die. He’s not sure how – can you even eat yourself to death? he wonders – but it _must_ be happening.

He stays there for a while longer, panicking not so much because of the fear of death, but because the longer he waits to throw up, the longer all that revolting food will have been sitting in his stomach. It will be absorbed into his body and everything will be ruined. He will have overstepped his boundaries again. Kept what wasn’t his to take.

He tries to straighten himself up. The movement causes a regurgitated mouthful of fluids to surge up the back of his throat and he doesn’t manage to swallow it back down in time so it ends up dribbling all down his chin like he’s a fucking infant spitting up baby formula.

Still practically incapacitated by the pain in his belly, he just barely manages to open the car door and lean out of the vehicle before he’s jamming his fingers down his throat and throwing up harder than he ever has in his life. His hair slips out of its ponytail and falls into his face where it gets caught in the seemingly unending spray of vomit and he can’t tie it back again because he’s too busy making himself sick with one hand and holding onto the frame of the car with the other so that he doesn’t topple right out of the damn thing.

He can only imagine what a thoroughly pathetic sight he must be right now, surrounded by empty fast food containers, puke running down his face and shirt. His face is a blotchy, swollen mess, lips splitting with sores, the once fine arcs of his cheekbones now just sunken trenches. His eyes are webbed with red because the tiny blood vessels in them have ruptured from the pressure of all the vomiting. He’s just surprised his heart itself hasn’t burst, too.

He vomits until he can’t move, can’t breathe, until his knuckles are skinned raw from scraping up against his teeth and it’s only blood and bile coming out.

Okay, _now_ he must be dying.

He nearly starts to cry for real, wondering how the fuck things got to be so out of control. Because that's what they are. He can't even trick himself into believing otherwise by justifying it with his Rules because he's long since broken all of them. There's simply no denying the ugly truth now, not when he's eaten days worth of food in under an hour and feels like his heart is going to thrum right out of his chest and yet there's still a part of him that doesn't want to stop.

And then, suddenly, in the middle of all that madness, a very clear and curious thought:

He does not want to die.

It isn’t so much a revelation as it is a begrudging acknowledgment, but it shocks him nevertheless. Embarrasses him, even. As if it’s some kind of laughable weakness, to want to live.

For him, perhaps, it is.

Pain is all that has defined his existence for nearly a century. If he gets rid of it, what does that leave him with? Steve says he’s still _Bucky_ under all the layers of what’s happened to him, but what if he peels them away only to find out that there was never anything worthwhile under there after all?

Then again, a tiny but infuriatingly rational part of his mind argues, it’s not like his current existence is notably worthwhile either.

He picks up his phone.

“Bucky?” is the first word that comes crackling over the line, the voice breathless and breaking and so achingly, hearteningly familiar that Bucky wishes he could wrap himself up in it like sheets fresh out of the dryer.

“Steve,” Bucky whispers back.

“Oh god, Buck,” Steve says, and Bucky thinks he might be crying. “Don’t you ever fucking— you scared me to death, you fucking _asshole._ Where are you? I’m going to come get you.”

“You can’t,” Bucky says dumbly. “I took the car.”

“I’m gonna call Sam, see if I can borrow his. Just... Where the fuck are you?”

“I— the Wendy’s at First and O Street.”

“Okay,” Steve says, and Bucky hears the sound of motion, probably Steve gathering his keys and putting on his shoes. “Okay, you just— stay right where you are, you hear me? I’ll be there in fifteen, twenty minutes tops.”

“Okay.”

“I’m going to hang up now so I can call Sam, all right?”

“Y-yeah.” A pause, then Bucky shouts out, “Steve, wait!”

“Mm? What is it? I’m here.”

Bucky is quiet for a long time. There are words trying to claw their way out of his mouth, words that he's never dared utter out loud before, but the syllables won’t stop scrambling for freedom, so Bucky finally lets them loose: “I think... I think I need help.”

There is a sob in Steve’s voice when he answers, but relief, too. “I know, Buck. You do. And that’s okay. ‘Cause we’re gonna get it for you, okay? Just... hang tight. Hang in there.”

Bucky does, in more ways than one.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to anyone who's been reading this thing. it's literally the most self-indulgent thing i've ever written, written more for myself than anything else, so i appreciate any- and everyone who has nevertheless taken an interest in this. it means so much to me that you have taken the time to read or comment or been so brave as to share your experiences with me.
> 
> come hang with me on [tumblr](http://www.wolveroonie.tumblr.com) if you want! i swear i'm more fun than my fic suggests.


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